Science, literature, and art, were promoted in London during the period before us, by the establishment of several well-known institutions. The British Museum was formed in 1753, in consequence of the will of Sir Hans Sloane, who bequeathed his large collection of curiosities to government for £20,000, which was £30,000 less than they cost him. An act of parliament was passed for their purchase, and Montague House, Bloomsbury, was taken and fitted up for the reception of Sloane's treasures, and other collections, scientific and literary, upon which great sums of money were expended. The Royal Academy, for the encouragement and improvement of British artists and sculptors, was constituted in 1768, and the first public exhibition was made at Somerset House in 1780. The Royal Institution in Albemarle-street was opened in 1799. The College of Surgeons was incorporated in 1800.
Other institutions, sacred to humanity and benevolence, and fraught with great benefit to multitudes of our suffering race, were originated within the last fifty years of the eighteenth century. In 1755, Middlesex Hospital was founded, the generous exertions which led to it having begun some years earlier. Three years later, the Magdalen Hospital, for the reformation and relief of penitent females, was opened in Prescott-street, Goodman-fields, and afterwards transferred to an appropriate building, erected for the purpose in St. George's-fields, in 1709. The foundation-stone of the Lying-in Hospital, on the Surrey side of Westminster-bridge, was laid in 1765; and a similar institution was begun in the City-road in 1770. The Royal Humane Society, for the recovery of persons from drowning, commenced in 1774. The Royal Literary Fund, for the relief of poor authors, was instituted in 1790.
The religious societies of London, whose character adorns the English capital, eclipsing its artistic and commercial splendour, chiefly belong to the present century. The London Missionary Society, however, for preaching the Gospel of Christ among the heathen, began as early as 1795. The declaration of the Society was signed at the Castle and Falcon, Aldersgate-street. In the year 1709 was formed, also, the institution by which the present volume is issued—the Religious Tract Society. Commencing with small beginnings, it has, through the prospering hand of God upon its labors, been privileged to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ in one hundred and ten languages and dialects; and, in the course of half a century, to circulate its varied messengers of mercy to the vast amount of five hundred millions of copies.
Since the conclusion of the eighteenth century, London has undergone an unprecedented change, upon which the limits of this volume will not allow us to touch. The city, which is still swelling every year, in a degree which, if Horace, Walpole were living, would fill him with greater surprise than ever, is really new London. Few of the principal streets exhibit the appearance they did fifty years ago, and the architectural alteration is but a type of the social one. The superior sanitary arrangements, the more efficient police, the better education of most classes of society, the augmented provision for religious instruction and worship, the more decidedly evangelical tone of preaching in the metropolitan pulpits, and the increase of real piety amongst the population, must strike everyone, on even a superficial comparison of the past and present; and when we consider the great change wrought in half a century, it inspires encouragement in relation to the future. The impulse which things have received of late has been so mighty, that there is no calculating the acceleration of their future progress. Thus the remembrance of the past yields advantage, and we pluck hopes, "like beautiful wild flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland for the living forehead."—Coleridge. On taking a longer reach of comparison, an amount of wonder is inspired not to be adequately expressed. Had some sage in the Roman senate, two thousand years ago, proclaimed that the day would come, when an obscure town, situated on the Thames, a river scarcely known then to the Latin geographer, would vie with the city in which they were assembled on the Tiber, nay, eclipse it, and wax in glory while the other waned, that prediction would have strangely crossed their pride, and would have been indignantly pronounced incredible. Yet that day has come. The British town, then a mere inclosure, containing a few huts, has swelled into a city teeming with a population of above two millions, crowded with public buildings and costly habitations, filled with commerce, wealth, and luxury, the mirror of modern civilization, the metropolis of a mighty empire, and the wonder of the world—while the Roman city, then the mightiest and most splendid on the face of the earth, and the mistress of the globe, so far as its regions were discovered, retains no traces of her glory, and is chiefly interesting on account of her ancient name and associations.
Happily the genius of civilization in the two cities is completely diverse. In the early days of the Roman kingdom and republic, the people fought in self-defence; in later times, from a pure thirst for glory and dominion. In the best periods of its history, the virtues of the citizens were of the martial cast, and found a fostering influence in all the institutions of the state. To Rome, which then cradled a warlike people, London presents a contrast on which we look with satisfaction. London is the type of commercial civilization. The merchant, not the soldier, is most prominent and influential. The inhabitants of the English metropolis and country, it may be safely asserted, are looking not to armies as sources of greatness, and objects for gratulation, but to the busy thousands who are deepening and spreading the resources of national wealth by their commercial and manufacturing industry. The spirit of mercantile enterprise is as strongly stamped upon the English character, in their metropolis of the nineteenth century, as the spirit of war was stamped upon the character of the Romans in their metropolis before the Christian era. Rome had her trade as well as her army—her Ostia, whither her vessels brought for her use the luxuries of the East; but it was not there, but to the Campus Martius, where their legions performed their evolutions, that the stranger would have been taken to see the greatness of the republic. So the metropolis of the British empire is the rendezvous of a great military establishment, as well as an emporium of merchandise; but it is to the scenes on the borders of the Thames, to her spacious docks, her crowded shipping, her stores and warehouses, with all the accompaniments of busy commerce, presenting a spectacle which perfectly overpowers the mind with wonder—it is to those scenes that we should take the stranger, to impress him with an idea of the greatness of our chief city. The Hyde Park review, with cuirasses and swords glittering in the sun, and martial music floating through the air, affords a brilliant holiday entertainment, but all must feel that the English spirit of the nineteenth century is not there expressed. It is very true that the love of war has not lost its hold entirely on the public mind; that there are many who still pant for the conflict, and for the honors and prizes which successful warfare brings; but, we repeat it, the spirit of the nineteenth century is not there expressed, but it finds its exponent in the earnest activity which is ever witnessed round the neighborhood of London-bridge and the Exchange. The time is coming—is already come, when, as most intelligent men turn over the pages of the world's history, they award the palm of the noblest civilization to London, a city full of merchants and artisans, rather than to Rome, a city full of soldiers, flushed with the pride of victory, and drunk with the blood of the slain.
In all that relates to the state of society, the genius of the people, public opinion, general intelligence, taste, feeling, character—the comparison is decidedly in favor of the English capital. This is to be ascribed to many causes—to the intermingling of races, an insular position, political revolutions, enlarged experience, providential discoveries, and the creation of sentiments and opinions during centuries of mental activity; but, above all, it is to be ascribed to Christianity, which has long had a strong hold upon the hearts of multitudes, and which has indirectly exercised a most beneficial reflex influence upon the character of others, who have little regard for its doctrinal principles. The richest forms of modern civilization in London are founded on our religion. The elevation of woman to her proper rank, the improved character of the judicial code, the extinction of domestic slavery, the elevation of serfs of the soil to freemen having an estate in their own labor, the value set on life, the philanthropic institutions which abound—are all the results of evangelical light and principle. Let any one walk through the streets of London, and compare the aspect of things with what was exhibited to the man who walked through the streets of ancient Rome—and with all the vice and misery which exist in the former, there are found elements of social welfare, the acknowledged creation of Christian morals, at work, unknown in the latter. Indications of intelligence, peace, freedom, and charity, are found here, which were wanting there. The power and permanence of London must depend upon her morality and religion.
We look with intense interest to the young men of London. With pain, such as we cannot describe, we regard the gay, the dissolute, the intemperate—those who drown the higher faculties of the soul in sensual indulgence, who degrade their mental, moral, and spiritual nature, and, forgetting their relationship to angels, sink to the level of the brutes that perish. With pleasure, however, equally indescribable, we turn to the steady, the sober, the virtuous, the enlightened—those who labor after mental improvement, and especially those who seek spiritual excellence, who ask and practically answer the question, "While I am attending to the intellectual culture of the mind, ought I not to prepare for that eternity to which I am hastening, where moral and spiritual character will be all in all?" and who, repairing to the word of God, the source of all religious wisdom, have become the subjects of a discipline, which adorns the intellect with the beauties of sanctity, and prepares the soul for the vision and worship of heaven. Of such, London may well say with the mother of the Gracchi, but in a far more important sense, "These are my jewels."
Let it be the endeavor, as it is the duty of London citizens, to aid all wise schemes for its physical and intellectual amelioration, but especially such as relate to morals and religion. With a clear eye, a loving heart, a steady hand, and a determined will, each must apply himself to pulling down the evil, and building up the good. The moral health of a city should be the care of all its members. The most precious object amidst the multitude of precious things in the chief city of England is the citizen himself. Man, out of whose intellect, energy, and power, all the rest has grown—man, in whose capacities are found the germs of a greatness, the cultivation of which will a thousand times repay the toil it involves. The noblest of enterprises, be it remembered, is to be found, not in commercial speculation, or political reform, or even literary and scientific knowledge, but in the promotion of Christ's holy and saving religion, and in the recovery and purification of the soul, through faith in him, and its preparation for other realms of being in the infinite Hereafter. The enduring magnificence of such labor and its results exceeds all the doings of earthly ambition, even as the mighty Alps and Andes surpass the houses of ice and snow which children in their sports build up, and which are melting away before that sun in whose rays they glitter.
THE END.
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LONDON IN MODERN TIMES;
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