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another instance in which men and women worked together harmoniously and efficiently. Howard, in describing the principal hospital at Lyons, which he praises for its excellent and kindly management, as being so clean and so quiet," tells us that at that time (1776), he found it attended by nine physicians and surgeons, and managed by twelve Sisters of Charity. "There were Sisters who made up, as well as administered, all the medicines prescribed; for which purpose there was a laboratory and apothecary's shop, the neatest and most elegantly fitted up that can be conceived."*

I must notice, with due respect and admiration, another female community, also especially excepted by an Imperial decree when other religious orders were suppressed, and for the same reason; the Ursulines. We may smile at the childish and melancholy legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, and at the skulls heaped up in a certain mouldy tawdry chapel at Cologne; but of the Ursulines, as a community, we may be allowed to think seriously and even reverently. Their peculiar vocation was the care and instruction of poor children. They had their infant and ragged schools long before we had thought of them. Even from time immemorial there had existed, as we have seen, numerous communities of women to nurse and to pray; and there were isolated instances of women in the higher ranks extraordinarily pious and learned; but a community especially to take charge of children, to teach, to educate, and prepare and train teachers, was not known in Christendom till the institution of the Ursuline Sisters in 1537. This originated in Brescia. Angela da Brescia, a woman of birth and fortune, lost at an early age and in a painful manner, a young sister, to whom she was tenderly attached. At first her sorrow took refuge in prayer, seclusion, and pilgrimages, after the fashion of that time. It then took another form, and for the sake of her lost sister she devoted herself to the charitable work of collecting and educating poor female children.

• Howard also mentions the hospitals belonging to the order of Charity, in all countries, as the best regulated, the cleanest, the most tenderly served and managed of all he had met with. He mentions the introduction of iron bedsteads into one of their hospitals as something new to him. (In 1776.)

It is touching, it is sadly significant, to see how often the beneficent tendencies of women have, when acted out, taken their especial form from some deep domestic sorrow, or some strong bias of the affections. I could mention several examples I have known, where love or grief had thus modified the element of charity.

The institution of Angela da Brescia was the first of its kind; and so unheard of at this time was the attempt of women to organise a systematic education for their own sex, that when Françoise de Saintonge undertook to found such an establishment at Dijon, she was hooted in the streets, and her father called together four doctors learned in the law, "pour s'assurer qu'instruire des femmes n'était pas un œuvre du démon." Even after he had given his consent, he was afraid to countenance his daughter; and Françoise, unprotected, unaided, began her first community of Ursulines in a garret with five poor children. years afterwards she was almost carried in triumph through the streets of Dijon, bells ringing, flowers strewed in her path. She had succeeded, and the Church took her under its wing; and with that far-sighted wisdom which Lord Macaulay has pointed out as so characteristic, at once appropriated her and her good works.*

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These educational institutions multiplied during the next two hundred years, that is, down to the middle of the last century. The Ursuline Sisters behaved admirably during the French Revolution, and though dispersed and their

Speaking of the Church of Rome, he says:-"Even for female agency there is a place in her system. To devout women she assigns spiritual functions, dignities, and magistracies. In our country, if a noble lady is moved by more than ordinary zeal for the propagation of religion, the chance is, though she may disapprove of no one doctrine or ceremony of the Established Church, she will end by giving her name to a new schism. If a pious and benevolent woman enter the cells of a prison, to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her own sex, she does so without any authority from the Church; no line of action is traced for her, and it is well if the ordinary does not complain of her intrusion, and if the bishop does not shake his head at such irregular benevolence. At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the calendar as Saint Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be foundress and first superior of the blessed Order of Sisters of the Jails."

In this country permission has been lately obtained for a few benevolent ladies to visit in a few workhouses. The "line of action" has been traced out for them rigidly-not by the Church, not by any authority legislative or judicial, but by the Poor Law Guardians, one of whom in the town where I write this is a chimney sweeper.

houses suppressed, they followed their vocation, and by collecting and teaching the poor orphans of massacred parents, and assisting the village Curés, they prevented a mass of evil. As soon as order was restored they were reinstated, but their establishments have not since increased in number. The extension of secular schools in France and Germany, and the popularity of the Sisters of Mercy, who unite the educational duties of the Ursulines with those of the Hospitalières, have in some degree superseded them. I have, however, visited several of the Ursuline houses; and I remember one in particular which I visited five and twenty years ago. To reach the school, where more than 300 children were assembled, I had to pass through a room in which about sixty infants were lying in cradles or on mattresses, while two of the sisterhood were going about with pap, and stilling as well as they could the incessant whimpering and squealing;-it was an absurd and yet a pathetic scene. These were babies left by poor women who had gone to their daily work and were to return for them in the afternoon; and this plan has since been imitated in the admirable charity of "Les Crèches," instituted at Paris, and similar charities in this country."

Now I do not say that the education given by those good Sisters was the best possible-far from it. It did not go much beyond the a, b, c, the Catechism, and a little needlework, but it was not worse than that which many of our dame schools afforded fifty years ago; and it established as a principle that women might be permitted to teach as well as to learn; a principle so familiar to us in these days, that we quite forget to look back to a period when it was a strange unheard-of novelty, and had to do battle against prejudices, both of the clergy and the people.

It can easily be imagined that institutions like these, composed of such various ingredients, spread over such various countries and over several centuries of time, should have been subject to the influences of time; though from a deep-seated principle of vitality and necessity they seem to have escaped its vicissitudes, for they did not change in character or purpose, far less perish. That in ages of

Since this was written, an Infant Nursery on the same principle bas been added to that excellent institution, the Hospital for Sick Children, in Great Ormond Street.

superstition they should have been superstitious, that in ages of ignorance they should have been ignorant,-debased. in evil selfish times, by some alloy of selfishness and cupidity, in all this there is nothing to surprise us; but one thing does seem remarkable. While the men who professed the healing art were generally astrologers and alchymists, dealing in charms and nativities,-lost in dreams of the Elixir Vita and the Philosopher's Stone, and in such mummeries and quackeries as made them favourite subjects for comedy and satire,-these simple Sisters, in their hospitals, were accumulating a vast fund of practical and traditional knowledge in the treatment of disease, and the uses of various remedies;-knowledge which was turned to account and condensed into rational theory and sound method, when in the 16th century Surgery and Medicine first rose to the rank of experimental sciences and were studied as such. The poor Hospitalières knew nothing of Galen and Hippocrates, but they could observe if they could not describe, and prescribe if they could not demonstrate. Still, in the course of time great abuses had certainly crept into these religious societies, not so bad or so flagrant, perhaps, as those which disgraced within a recent period many of our own incorporated charities,— but bad enough, and vitiating, if not destroying, their power to do good. The funds were sometimes misappropriated, the novices ill-trained for their work, the superiors careless, the Sisters mutinous, the treatment of the sick remained rude and empirical. Women of sense and feeling, who wished to enrol themselves in these communities, were shocked and discouraged by such a state of things. A reform became absolutely necessary.

This was brought about, and very effectually, about the middle of the seventeenth century.

Louise de Marillac-better known as Madame Legras, when left a widow in the prime of life, could find, like Angela da Brescia, no better refuge from sorrow than in active duties, undertaken "for the love of God." She desired to join the Hospitalières, and was met at the outset by difficulties, and even horrors, which would have extinguished a less ardent vocation, a less determined will. She set herself to remedy the evils, instead of shrinking from them. She was assisted and encouraged in her good work

by a man endued with great ability and piety, enthusiasm equal, and moral influence even superior, to her own. This was the famous Vincent de Paul, who had been occupied for years with a scheme to reform thoroughly the prisons and the hospitals of France. In Madame Legras he found a most efficient coadjutor. With her charitable impulses and religious enthusiasm, she united qualities not always, not often, found in union with them: a calm and patient temperament, and that administrative faculty, indispensable in those who are called to such privileged work. She was particularly distinguished by a power of selecting and preparing the instruments, and combining the means, through which she was to carry out her admirable purpose. With Vincent de Paul and Madame Legras was associated another person, Madame Goussaut, who besieged the Archbishop of Paris till what was refused to reason was granted to importunity, and they were permitted to introduce various. improvements into the administration of the hospitals. Vincent de Paul and Louise Legras succeeded at last in constituting, not on a new, but on a renovated basis, the order of Hospitalières, since known as the Sisterhood of Charity. A lower class of sisters were trained to act under the direction of the more intelligent and educated women. Within twenty years this new community had two hundred houses and hospitals; in a few years more it had spread over all Europe. Madame Legras died in 1660. Already before her death the women prepared and trained under her instructions, and under the direction of Vincent de Paul (and here we have another instance of the successful communion of labour), had proved their efficiency on some extraordinary occasions. In the campaigns of 1652 and 1658 they were sent to the field of battle, in groups of two and four together, to assist the wounded. They were invited into the besieged towns to take charge of the military hospitals. They were particularly conspicuous at the siege of Dunkirk, and in the military hospitals established by Anne of Austria at Fontainebleau. When the plague broke out in Poland in 1672, they were sent to direct the hospitals at Warsaw, and to take charge of the orphans, and were thus introduced into Eastern Europe; and, stranger than all they were even sent to the prison-infirmaries where the branded forçats and condemned felons lay cursing