It is not only in her sweet submission to her own personal sorrows, but in her tender thoughtfulness for others who suffer, and her anxious efforts to help and alleviate, that the gentlewoman wins our reverent affection; and it was never more manifest than now. For example, in all the contrasts which may present themselves between Then and Now, there will be none more conspicuous than in the character of our nurses and the condition of our hospitals sixty years ago and now; and when we recall the terrible neglect of the helpless and the imbecile in the past, and regard the treatment and accommodation in the present, our sackcloth is put off for the garment of praise.

CHAPTER VIII

The Nurse

Thy love

Shall chant itself its own beatitudes

After its own life-working. A child's kiss

Set on thy sighing lips shall make thee glad ;

A poor man served by thee shall make thee rich,

A sick man helped by thee shall make thee strong;
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense

Of service which thou renderest.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

CHARLES DICKENS informs us in his preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that in his early life Mrs. Sarah Gamp was a fair representative of the hired attendant of the poor in sickness; and his biographer, John Forster, tells us that he might have added that the rich were no better off, because Mrs. Gamp's original was in reality a person hired by a distinguished lady to take charge of a very dear friend of her own. Dickens goes on to state "that though many of the London hospitals were noble institutions, others were defective, and that it was not the least of the instances of their mismanagement that Mrs. Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of a hospital nurse, and that the hospitals with their means and funds should have

left it to private humanity and enterprise to enter upon an attempt to improve that class of persons, since greatly improved by the agency of good women."

Compare the delineation which accompanies the history of these ignorant, coarse, fat, flabby females, unkempt, unclean, drinking gin out of a teapot, with our modern nurses, taught and trained, comely, shapely, neat and trim, bright and cheery. Regard this counterpart presentment of two sisters-the former waddling and puffing, with their coal-scuttle bonnets and gig umbrellas, or drowsing by the fireside, the latter in their simple, becoming uniform, active, vigilant -the difference between a barge waterlogged (gin-andwater-logged) and a yacht that flies on the sea.

To whom do we owe the transformation? To Florence Nightingale. Of all the saints in our calendar not named in the scriptures, who so worthy of our veneration as Sancta Philomena? The voice of "The Swedish Nightingale " is silent now, but the music which our Nightingale composed to soothe the sufferer and to teach hymns of praise to those who were ready to perish is heard in many lands. When we think of her beneficence, and then turn to those records of miracles and exposition of relics which the credulity of ordinary minds is quite incompetent to grasp, to the nuns mured in captivity, and the monks who are not allowed to speak, what can we feel but a sad and pitiful regret for these evasions of the work and the duty which we owe to each other and to the position in which we were placed; and how can we repress some such words of

remonstrance as those which Dr. Johnson spoke to the abbess, "Madam, you are here, not so much from your love of virtue, as from your fear of vice"? Who are the bravest soldiers of the Cross? They who shut themselves up in a fortress or they who go forth to fight? Who are the most obedient attendants upon One Who came to seek and to save and went about doing good?

It was manifest from her childhood, as almost invariably with those heroes and heroines of history who have been the lovers and leaders of mankind, that Florence Nightingale had special gifts and sympathies, and that she was inspired by a sacred ambition to use them for the alleviation of pain and sorrow. I remember a row of young palm-trees in Dr. Bennett's garden at Mentone, and one of them was thrice the height of the rest. There was a tank of water five yards below, but the tree had reached it with its roots. So Florence, rooted and grounded in love, rose above her fellows. In her girlhood she visited with her father many of the principal hospitals of Europe, and in her twenty-first year she began to train as a nurse with the Protestant deaconesses of Kaiserwerth on the Rhine, and afterwards studied the management of hospitals with the sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris.

In 1854 news came to came to England of the gallant battle of the Alma and of great multitudes of soldiers wounded and sick. Her offer of help was gratefully accepted by the Government, and she lost no time in embarking, with thirty-four nurses, for the Crimea.

A few months after her arrival she had ten thousand sick under her care. The work which she did, to the injury of her own health, in the hospital at Scutari and elsewhere was marvellous: the soldiers worshipped her, the world loved her. When the war was over, £50,000 was subscribed to found an institution for the training of nurses in connection with the hospitals of St. Thomas' and King's College.

*

From that time to this there has been a continuation and a development of the noble work which she inaugurated, and of the special objects which she has told us were uppermost in her hearts' desire-the better construction, arrangement, and service of our hospitals; pure air, not polluted by noxious smoke and vapours, a clean, dry soil, spacious apartments, ample ventilation, no superfluous furniture, an abundant supply of water, the best of everything, without extravagance or waste, a matron of pleasant appearance, sweet temper, cheery conversation, energetic zeal, with trained nurses to match. The latter are taught to minister to all sorts and conditions of maladies and men, in public

As they worshipped those who followed her example in the present South African war. I hear from my son, and others who were present, of their infinite devotion. A nephew, who was sixteen weeks in hospital with enteric fever, tells me that he cannot express his grateful admiration of the hard work which they did with untiring cheerfulness. There was only one nurse when he was left at Bothaville with fifty other patients. She was there all the day, and sometimes came in the night; but they were all the same, and he saw many. There was nothing they would not do.