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 Library 
 
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 the Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031442670 
 
UL1XU GU.L READING. 
 
BLIND PEOPLE: 
 
 THEIR WORKS AND WAYS; 
 
 WITH SKETCHES OP 
 
 THE LIVES OF SOME FAMOUS BLIND MEN. 
 
 BY 
 
 EEV. B. G. JOHNS, M.A., 
 
 CHAPLAIN OP THE BLIND SCHOOL, ST. GEOKGE's FIELDS. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH WOODCUTS. 
 
 LONDON: 
 JOHN MUEEAY, ALBEMAELE STEEET. 
 
 1867. 
 T 
 
 The right of Translation is reserved. 
 
PJUNTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STBBET, 
 AND CHARFNG-CnOSS. 
 
TO 
 
 EDMUND CHAELES JOHNSON, Esq., 
 
 IN TOKEN OF 
 
 OLD AND TRIED FRIENDSHIP. 
 
SOCJTHWARK. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 rpHE lights and shadows which chequer the life of 
 a blind man are as bright and deep as those 
 which befall the rest of the world. Night shuts him 
 in all round; but work, and joy, and peace, and con- 
 tent — or selfishness, sloth, discontent, and regret — 
 are as often found within his narrow circle, as in the 
 wide one of broader day. Few but they who have felt 
 it know how deep that cloud is ; nor, indeed, under 
 what peculiar disadvantages, difficulties, and trials, 
 the Blind labour. But the. writer knows full well 
 how in the midst of all these trials they who have to 
 meet them shew many a trait of manly courage, of 
 faith, and hope, which might be looked for in vain 
 elsewhere. He has found under this cloud many a 
 willing, thoughtful, learner ; many a quiet, grateful, 
 heart ; industry and perseverance of the highest 
 order ; even if far more rarely, here and there, traces 
 of self-will and petulance of the lowest. The aim of 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 the following pages is to shew what these lights and 
 shadows are, what the difficulties are, and how they are 
 met ; as well as to give a fair idea of the general con- 
 dition of the Blind throughout England ; of what has 
 been, and what may yet be, done for its improvement. 
 For the last seventeen years the author's life has 
 been given to labouring among them, with increasing 
 interest and pleasure, and not without some new 
 insight into their special needs, powers, and charac- 
 teristics. As far as possible he has endeavoured to 
 speak from his own experience and observation, and, 
 where he has had to rely on others, to verify their 
 words ; a task that is not always so easy as it might 
 seem. For the Blind, as a class, are apt to be shy 
 and reserved in speaking of their own' peculiar state, 
 or more special "works and ways." Feeling their 
 own isolation, they are inclined to shrink from con- 
 tact with the outer world of light, and rarely give 
 expression to their thoughts, but in a form too brief 
 or too general to satisfy the inquirer. Yet, wherever 
 it was possible, recourse has been had to their own 
 words, which have been left to tell their plain story. 
 
 It would have been easy to add to the nunlber of 
 the short biographical sketches at the end of the 
 volume ; but, on examination, it was found that the 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 information concerning many other famous Blind 
 people was of far too brief and fragmentary a kind to 
 admit of being woven into a continuous story. A few, 
 therefore, of the more complete cases have been 
 selected as specimens, and to these some addition 
 may perhaps be made at a future time. The scanty 
 leisure of a busy life has been heartily given to 
 the task of rendering this little book as complete as 
 the author could make it ; and though no one can 
 be more conscious of its imperfections than himself, 
 it may still serve to convey, he hopes, a fair and true 
 picture of a class in whose welfare he takes a deep 
 and unbroken interest. 
 
 B. G. J. 
 
 All Saints' Bay, 1866. 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS. 
 
 Blind Girl Beading Frontispiece. 
 
 School foe Indigent Blind, St. George's Fields, South- 
 wake tage vi 
 
 Blind Basket-makek 9 
 
 Blind Boy's Ciphertng-boabd 12,13 
 
 Saundebson's Board for Arithmetical Calculations .. 15 
 
 Placing of Pins in ditto 10 
 
 Blind Boy's Embossing Frame 18 
 
 Specimen of Embossing ib. 
 
 Blind Weaver's Pattern-board 22 
 
 The Blind Weaver 24 
 
 The Basket Shop 30 
 
 The Bllnd Boy's Chess-board 35 
 
 Bltnd Basket-maker 79 
 
 Blind Brtjsh-maker 82 
 
 Paper Fire-place cut out by a Blind Woman 87 
 
 Systems of Mvsical Notation 104, 105 
 
 Systems of Embossed Printing 109,112,113,114 
 
 Blind Girl Beading 116 
 
 John Metcalf, the Bo ad-maker ISO 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Introductory — The Sense of Touch 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Sense of Hearing — Its keenness — The difficulties 
 attending blindness — its advantages — isolation ; 
 its perils — How the Blind Dream — Poetry of 
 Blind People — The in powers of Memory — Chess — 
 Statistics of Blindness — Beggars 31 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Chief Blind Schools in England — Trampers — 
 
 Embossed Printing 78 
 
 .CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Music for the Blind — Wandering Musicians — Bund 
 
 Tom — Blind Saras J 88 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Systems of Reading .. 10S 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Shocld Blind Children be educated •wrrH those who 
 
 have sight, ob not? 118 
 
xii CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Further Statistics — Education op Upper Class .. ■■ 124 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Introductory to Biography 131 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Francis Huber, the Blind Naturalist 135 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 John Metcalf, the Road-maker 149 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 John Stanley-, the Blind Musician 165 
 
 CHAPTER XH. 
 
 Nicholas Saunderson, the Blind Mathematician . . . . 174 
 
 CHAPTER Xin. 
 
 Conclusion — What is yet to be done for the Blind — 
 
 Caution to Parents of Blind Children 181 
 
BLIND PEOPLE: 
 
 THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 TN the year 1712, in one of the Fellows' rooms at 
 Christ's College, Cambridge, sat three learned 
 and famous men discussing a knotty point over the 
 winter fire. Two of them were antiquaries, as well 
 as scholars, and on the table before them lay a small 
 drawer of Roman coins, concerning some of which 
 the battle waxed hot. Over one headless emperor, 
 whose very name and date none but the initiated 
 could guess at from the coin before them, the discus- 
 sion grew especially fierce. It had been purchased 
 as a rare and matchless gem by the elder of the 
 two' collectors, who both agreed as to its extreme 
 value, but differed as to its exact date. Their friend 
 by the fire took no part in the discussion, but, at 
 last, when the coin was handed to him for examina- 
 
 B 
 
2 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. I. 
 
 tion and judgment, his answer was prompt and 
 decided enough. Strange to say, he did not glance 
 at the medal, but having felt it over very carefully 
 with the tips of his fingers, he next applied it t 
 his tongue.* This done, he quietly laid the headless 
 Augustus down on the table, saying as he did so, 
 " 50 B.C., or 88 a.d., the thing isn't worth a shilling ; 
 I doubt very much its being gold, and I'm sure it 
 isn't Eoman;" and the next day proved that he 
 was in the right: thus, oddly enough, fulfilling the 
 old Portuguese Proverb, " Achou o cego hum dinheiro" 
 " The Blind man has picked up a Coin." The thing 
 that had been shown to him and detected was a 
 
 * John Gough, the Blind Mathematician and Naturalist of Kendal, 
 always examined a rare plant in the same way, by applying it to the 
 tip of his tongue ; and when in his old age one such was trough t to 
 him, having examined it in this fashion, he at once called it by the 
 correct name, adding that he had seen but one specimen of it, and 
 " that was fifty years ago." Little is known of this Gough but that he 
 was blind from his infancy ; that he was the son of poor people at Ken- 
 dal ; that he acquired a fair knowledge of the Classics at an ordinary 
 Grammar School, devoting more time and thought, as he grew up, 
 to Mathematics, in which he greatly excelled, and numbering among 
 his pupils the famous names of Whewell, second Wrangler, and late 
 Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; Dawes, fourth "Wrangler, 
 Gaskin, second Wrangler, and King, senior Wrangler ; as well as 
 John Dalton, the President of the Manchester Philosophical Society. 
 Gough was born in 1757, ob. 1825. 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS, 3 
 
 clever counterfeit, got up for the occasion of an 
 antiquarian sale, just as Roman coins were dug up 
 a year or two ago in making the Thames Embank- 
 ment. Yet this keen judge was Nicholas Saunderson, 
 a blind man, who had never set eyes on a coin good, 
 bad, or indifferent ; having lost not only his eye- 
 sight, but even his very eye-balls, by the small-pox 
 in 1682, when but a twelvemonth old. He was now 
 Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the first 
 University of the World, a friend of Whiston, Halley, 
 and Sir Isaac Newton, whose ' Principia ' formed one 
 chief subject of his public Lectures. His whole life 
 from boyhood had been one of striking interest, 
 though we can here do no more than touch on the 
 few salient points which startle us in the career 
 of a blind man. At the Free School of Penuistone, 
 in Yorkshire, and with the help of a reader and 
 such few books as his father, an exciseman, could 
 procure for him at' home, by dint of unwearied 
 perseverance he managed to acquire such a know- 
 ledge of the Classics as to master the works of 
 Euclid, Archimedes, Diophantus, and Newton, in 
 their original Greek and Latin. This was all done 
 before he was twenty ; at twenty-five he was a 
 famous teacher in Cambridge ; at thirty, Lucasian 
 
 B 2 
 
4 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. T. 
 
 Professor, M.A. by royal mandate, lecturing on the 
 solar spectrum, the laws of light, and the theory 
 of the rainbow, — on none of which he had ever 
 looked. 
 
 His genius as a mathematician, his keenness of 
 judgment, his accuracy as a reasoner, and his dexterity 
 and quickness in performing arithmetical operations, 
 naturally lead to the question of how far the sense 
 of touch in the blind, as well as the mental powers, 
 can be so educated as to atone for or supply the 
 place of the sense that is gone. The common notion 
 is that when a child loses his sight, the other bodily 
 and mental powers are all stimulated and sharpened 
 to such an increase of new and keen life as to 
 supply the deficiency — touch, hearing, taste, and 
 intellect all becoming doubly acute. But this is 
 only one of the plausible fancies by which people 
 relieve their minds from the uneasy contemplation 
 of a hopeless calamity ; for, on the contrary, wide and 
 long experience has clearly proved that in ninety- 
 nine cases out of a hundred the loss of sight for 
 a greater or less time shatters the whole framework 
 of mind and body; and the remaining senses and 
 powers, instead of springing into new life, are 
 weakened and depressed, A man does not become 
 
Chap. 1. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 5 
 
 blind by merely shutting bis eyes.* " Blindness," says 
 Guillie, " not only deprives a man of the sensations 
 which belong to sight, but often modifies and distorts 
 all his thoughts. Untrained he may have no idea 
 of decorum, of social propriety, or of modesty." (Dm 
 Puiseaux used to say, that he could not' understand 
 why one part of the body should be covered more 
 than another.) His loss of vision seems to affect 
 every part of him. If it befalls him suddenly, when 
 grown up, he is for a time utterly prostrated ; and 
 many a long weary month may pass before he can 
 so far rouse himself as to set to work at any task 
 with hope or spirit. But if born blind his lot is 
 still worse. He is from the first more or less cut 
 off from the rest of the world, treated in some 
 respects as an inferior, weaker and less capable than 
 his friends and companions ; and though most un- 
 willing to believe this himself, he at last sinks into 
 a state of isolation in which "the darkness may 
 be felt." "For nine-tenths even of seeing men, 
 daily, customary, life is a dark and mean abode. 
 
 * Certainly not Horatio Nelson, who, when his Admiral signalled 
 to him to bring his ship out of action, said to his First Lieutenant, 
 " You may see the signal ; I cannot : you know I am blind on that 
 side. Nail my colours to the mast." 
 
6 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. I. 
 
 Unless he often opens the door and windows, and 
 looks out into a freer world beyond, the dust and 
 cobwebs soon thicken over every entrance of light, 
 and in the perfect gloom he forgets that beyond 
 and above there is an open, boundless, air." * And 
 this is the very peril to which the blind boy is 
 specially exposed. Doors and windows, entrances 
 for living light, are the things he never opens ; they 
 are unknown to him, or utterly beyond his reach. 
 If his friends are well off, and educated people, 
 all the appliances that education demands and 
 money can procure are at once brought to bear 
 upon him. The hand of love leads him to the 
 tree of knowledge, proves that it is within even 
 his reach; shows to him a spark of light in the 
 darkness, how the spark may be fanned into a flame, 
 and the flame made to shine cheerily on the up-hill 
 path. But if his friends be poor, or uneducated, 
 the whole treatment is reversed. Too often he is 
 pushed aside into a corner as an encumbrance, or 
 at all events one for whom little or nothing can be 
 done ; treated perhaps not unkindly, but gradually 
 spoiled in the worst sense of the word by a mixture 
 
 * Sterling. 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 7 
 
 of careless neglect and more worthless indulgence. 
 In this case the boy sinks into a condition little 
 better than that of an animal ; vicious or mischievous, 
 amiable, lazy, or apathetic, as the case may be ; 
 but probably into darkness moral as well as mental, 
 greater or less according to the light about him. 
 Bodily pleasures are his main thought ; he becomes 
 selfish ; selfishness at times makes him talkative, 
 but as often moody; he grows silent, reserved, 
 nervous, timid, opinionated, and discontented. These 
 are too often (whatever optimists may imagine to the 
 contrary) the characteristics of poor blind children. 
 
 With some such characteristics we will suppose 
 a boy to be sent up from the country to- some Blind 
 School — say that for the Indigent Blind in St. 
 George's Fields. Let us see what becomes of him, 
 if a boy of average ability. He is brought into an 
 extensive and rambling building, containing a large 
 number of rooms, and enclosing two good-sized 
 playgrounds respectively for girls and boys. This 
 building stretches over nearly two acres of ground ; 
 and with almost every part of his* side of it — all 
 its outer shops and dependencies — he has to become 
 
 * It is divided into two distinct wings, one exclusively for males 
 and the other for females. 
 
8 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. I. 
 
 acquainted almost entirely by touch and ear ; with 
 a little help from a companion's longer experience. 
 It is all so utterly new and strange to him that 
 for the first day or two he is entirely dependent 
 on some pupil's or teacher's hand to get as far 
 as the school-room, the chapel, dining-room, or 
 basket-shop, all of which are widely apart, But " first 
 impressions with the blind are all in all,"* and 
 within a week the chances are that out of his eighty 
 blind fellow pupils he has chosen one as a com- 
 panion, and probably his friend, for several years 
 to come, who, if need be, convoys him across the 
 open yard to any special point — to the dormitory, 
 or through the more intricate navigation of staircase 
 leading to the band-room. f In a month all the 
 plain sailing is fairly mastered. He can find his 
 way from the dining-room to the basket-shop, and 
 down that shop, 150 yards long, just to the very 
 site of his own box on which he sits to split the 
 withies for basket-work. He knows his own box, 
 
 * Guillie, p. 47. 
 
 t This Band consists of about thirty instrumental performers, 
 violins, flutes, and brass horns* &e., and manages to play with sur- 
 prising cleverness such music as one hears from a good German 
 hand. 
 
Chap. I. 
 
 THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 too, from Smith's and Brown's on either side of 
 him. In a year he will know probably his own 
 tools from theirs by some little flaw or feature not 
 
 BLIND BASKET-MAKER. 
 
 patent to the eye of a looker-on ; in a couple of 
 years he will know the handle of the door to music- 
 room No. 5 from that of No. 6 ; he will run quickly 
 
10 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. I. 
 
 with a half-finished basket in his hand from the 
 workshop, across a wide yard, exactly to the very 
 door-step of the open shed in which is a tank for 
 soaking his willow-work. His senses of touch and 
 hearing are being silently and surely educated ; as 
 their education progresses they become keener — 
 hearing as a sharp and watchful sentinel,* guide, 
 and spy; touch as his servant-of-all-work and de- 
 tective. To the seeing, touch t is an auxiliary, but 
 to the blind boy it is the primary sense of all. 
 By it he knows his own clothes, and almost all 
 the property that he possesses % — his tools, box, bed, 
 
 * Thus, his keenness of hearing once saved Blacklock's life. He 
 was -walking in a garden down a path leading straight to a deep 
 well ; and into this he would have certainly walked had not a 
 favourite dog run on hefore him, and hy the sound of its feet upon the 
 board, by which one half of the well was covered, apprised him of 
 his peril. 
 
 t Oddly enough, this keen and trusty servant, touch, may fail the 
 blind boy if partially restored to sight. A patient couched by 
 Cheselden, though blind from birth, regained her sight ; but she no 
 longer knew her keys, pencil, or watch as she had previously done 
 by touch. As the higher sense entered, the lower retired, as if 
 into abeyance. 
 
 % A blind boy sent by his master to sell fish in the village, cut 
 certain nicks or notches in the head or tail of each cod, and thus 
 wrote down the price of his goods where his finger could feel it ; and 
 yet not to be detected by the eye of the customer. 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. II 
 
 hat, fiddle, cupboard, seat in chapel, school-room, 
 and workshop ; by it he reads his chapter in 
 St. John or in Eobinson Crusoe; he plays chess 
 or dominoes ; works a sum in Long Division, or 
 writes a letter home "to his mother which she can 
 read with her eyes, and he with his fingers. By 
 the help of touch he weaves a rug of coloured 
 wools embracing every variety of scroll-work, or 
 of those peculiar flowers and fruits which grow 
 only on carpet-land; or fringes with delicate green 
 and red a door-mat for a lady's boudoir; by touch 
 he sees any curiosity, such as a lamp from the 
 Pyramids, or a scrap of mineral, which you describe 
 to him, and which, having once handled, he always 
 speaks of as having been seen. He thinks he can 
 read a good deal of your character by touch when 
 you shake hands with him ; and when he has heard 
 you talk for a few minutes he will make a good 
 guess as to your age, temper, ability and stature. 
 Saunderson, at times, guessed even more than this. 
 He had been sitting one day and pleasantly chatting 
 with some visitors for an hour, when one of them 
 wished the company good morning, and left the 
 room. "What white teeth that lady has!" said 
 the sarcastic professor. "How can you possibly 
 
12 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE — 
 
 Chap. J. 
 
 tell that?" said a friend. " Because," was the ready- 
 answer, " for the last half-hour she has done nothing 
 but laugh." This was shrewd enough ; but specially 
 characteristic of him as a blind man. 
 
 To illustrate the way in which a blind boy of fair 
 ability manages to accomplish by touch some one or 
 two of those tasks just now enumerated, let us take 
 three of the more curious as types of the rest ; how 
 he does a sum in long division, how he writes a letter, 
 and weaves a rug. His slate is a board of about 
 12 inches by 10, bound with metal round the 
 edges, and containing about 190 pentagonal holes a 
 quarter of an inch apart, arranged in the following 
 fashion : — 
 
 Into these holes he inserts a five-sided metal pin, 
 which, according to its position, and the end kept 
 uppermost, represents the numerals from 1 to 0. The 
 
Chap. I. 
 
 THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 13 
 
 pin is of this shape and aspect, under its two positions. 
 
 When used with the obtuse end upwards, the pin 
 in its five different positions repre- 
 sents the five odd numbers, 1, 3, 5, 
 7, 9 ; when reversed, and with the 
 bifurcated end upwards, it represents. 
 2, 4, 6, 8, 0, any of which the blind 
 
 boy easily and rapidly reads by running his finger 
 
 along the tops of the pins. A Long Division sum 
 
 would be represented thus : — 
 
 
 2 e 
 
 jfab 
 
 8 8 
 
 13 ) 348 ( 26 
 26 
 
 _78 
 lu 
 
14 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. T. 
 
 the two pentagonal holes without numbers marked 
 over them being blanks, left so purposely by the 
 arithmetician instead of the curved lines drawn by 
 his rival with eyes to separate divisor, dividend, and 
 quotient. It is obvious, therefore, that all ordinary 
 sums in arithmetic may be worked by a blind boy 
 almost as quickly as, and far more plainly tban, by 
 the schoolboy on his greasy slate. The boy without 
 eyes, too, when he has mastered the four simple rales, 
 very often beats his opponent by performing parts of 
 his work mentally, and supposing figures which he 
 has not written down, and by having to draw neither 
 lines nor curves, to the great saving of time and 
 labour. Nor does he stop to write down the " Ques- 
 tion" in the Eule of Three, or Interest, &c, but, 
 after a moment's thought, plunges boldly into the 
 puzzle, and solves it with half the figures required by 
 an ordinary arithmetician. 
 
 The board on which Saunderson performed his 
 arithmetical calculations was a far more complicated 
 affair, and although we have a woodcut of it, its exact 
 nature and use are hard to be understood. No 
 account of it we have met with offers a clear explana- 
 tion of the various parts ; but we will do our best to 
 condense and improve that written by Hinchcliff, his 
 pupil and successor. 
 
IP. I. 
 
 THEIE WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 15 
 
 The board was thin and smooth, and rather more 
 ,n a foot square ; fixed in a narrow frame slightly 
 
 Kg. i. 
 
 Fig. 2. 
 
 sed above it, containing a great number of cross 
 •allel lines drawn at right angles to each other, 
 e edges of the board had grooves about two inches 
 
16 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. L 
 
 apart, and to each groove belong five parallels, each 
 square inch being subdivided into one hundred smaller 
 squares. At every point of intersection was a small 
 hole, to .receive a peg or pin. Saunderson always 
 kept two boxes of pins by his side when at work, and 
 these, by difference of position or head, expressed to 
 him the various numerals; a larger peg in the 
 centre of each little square standing for zero, a 
 smaller one for 1. The other numerals stand thus — 
 3 and were at once detected by their relative 
 position to the central or 1, the greater 
 pegs (for 0) being always in their place 
 when not needed for 1 ; serving him for 
 guides to preserve his line of figures and to prevent 
 other mistakes. 
 
 Saunderson placed and displaced the pins with 
 inconceivable quickness, but the exact way in 
 which be used them in performing his arithmetical 
 calculations is altogether a mystery. We imagine 
 that by far the larger portion of his work must have 
 been done mentally, and that he used groups of pins 
 from time to time, in certain relative positions, to 
 express certain stages in the operation, as memoranda 
 to which he could refer again and again with a touch, 
 and thus verify his work. Be this as it may, how- 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 17 
 
 ever, there is no doubt that he worked problems of 
 every — even the highest — kind, both in common 
 arithmetic, fractions, decimals, or algebra, with great 
 rapidity and equal accuracy. A glance at that part 
 of the board marked Fig. 1 will show how easily he 
 adapted it for the working of geometrical problems 
 by placing pins at the angular points, and surround- 
 ing them with a silk thread, so as to form any figure 
 which he required. Genius as he was, and full of 
 resources which genius alone can devise and use, he 
 would doubtless have rejoiced to possess one of the 
 plain and simple arithmetic boards now in use at 
 St. George's Fields.* 
 
 Embossing a letter is a far easier task than a sum 
 in arithmetic, and the horrors of spelling are less 
 than those of Long Division. When once a boy has 
 learned to read a chapter of ' Robinson Crusoe ' in 
 Alston's type (the Roman letter), he is very soon able 
 to write home and tell of his accomplishments. The 
 process is just like that which children call pricking 
 a pattern in paper, except that instead of being 
 managed with a single pin-point, an entire letter of 
 pin-points is pierced by one single pressure. The 
 embossing frame consists of two parts, one a plain 
 
 * Saunderson, with all his cleverness, was never able to write. 
 
18 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. I. 
 
 slab of wood about 14 inches long by 8 wide, covered 
 on one side with a thick layer of flannel or velvet ; 
 and the other of a plain framework of horizontal bars 
 about half an inch apart ; the two being connected by 
 hinges which join them together as a slip of leather 
 does the two covers of a book. When the blind 
 boy wishes to write a letter, he lays his sheet of paper 
 on side 2, and folds over upon it side 1, through 
 
 the bars of which he 
 
 presses small wooden 
 
 i i i i ill types, each bearing on one 
 
 end a Roman 1 etter formed 
 
 J of projecting pin-points. 
 
 ■m - - " - - 
 
 mamwmmm These he forces steadily 
 
 home through the paper into the flannel or leather 
 below, placing each letter as he does so the reverse 
 way, so as to make the embossing correct on the other 
 side of the paper. The process is a slow one, as every 
 letter has to be separately stamped down and held in 
 its place till it's next neighbour is introduced, that not 
 a grain of precious space be wasted ; but at last, duly 
 reversed and in good order, appear the pleasant words, 
 .- ;.■• »«. •:•«• ,<\ ,-.., 7.., ,, ....... ... ... _„. 
 
 V» 1 »•! • * •• L* " »» §23" ■•»• « \ 
 
 ■>• *:-•• «*..a .> .*«. a •«, a. #&' A. j^ J. J. J.j^- J7 *.. 
 
 And proud enough, we may well imagine, is Sam 
 
Chap. I. THEIR "WORKS AND WAYS. L9 
 
 Trotter, the village blacksmith, when he gets his first 
 letter from " our blind Johnny in London ;" it goes 
 the round of the whole community, and in spite of 
 some grievous lapses in orthography, is fairly worn 
 out at last with continual handling, unless locked up 
 by the good wife as too precious a document for the 
 perusal of ordinary mortals. Their wonder will be 
 doubled when Johnny comes home next year at the 
 Midsummer holidays, and reads off his own epistle 
 with the tips of his fingers. 
 
 The Weaver sets to work with a Loom of the or- 
 dinary kind, which therefore need not be described ; 
 and the only problem is, how shall the blind work- 
 man accurately follow a pattern of which he cannot 
 see a single step, in colours which he cannot dis- 
 tinguish. We pause only for a moment, by the way, 
 to notice one common and popular error still afloat, 
 viz., that some clever blind people have the power of 
 detecting colours by the touch. All we can say is, 
 that those who have had the experience of many 
 years, and opportunities for the personal examination 
 of many hundreds of blind persons, of all ages and 
 ranks, including some of remarkable ability, have not 
 been able to find the remotest trace of such a power. 
 
 "I know the difference of colours," said a blind 
 
20 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. I. 
 
 man, " because I remember them ; but I can't dis- 
 tinguish them by touch, nor do I think that any 
 blind man in the world ever could or did." Two 
 similar substances, of different colours, were given to 
 him to feel, but he could not distinguish between 
 them. "Both are the same to me," he said, "but 
 one feels stiffer than the other. I know hundreds of 
 blind people, — and none of us ever heard of one that 
 could tell colours by the feeL There's blind people 
 in the schools that tells the colours of their rods ; but 
 they does it by putting their tongue to them, and so 
 they tell them that's been dipped from them that 
 hasn't."* 
 
 There is no more resemblance now between sounds 
 and colours |. than in the time of Guillie, fifty years 
 ago ; so that no description will enable a blind man 
 to discern between a crimson poppy and the azure 
 corn-flower ; nor can there be any perceptible differ- 
 ence of texture in one morsel of wool, paper, cloth, 
 or feather stained red, and another of grassy green. 
 Dr. Moyes, indeed, who lost his sight at three years 
 of age, says that " red gave him a disagreeable sensa- 
 tion, like the touch of a saw," J and that as other 
 
 * Vide ' London Poor,' p. 402, vol. i. t Vide Guillie's Essay, p. 3. 
 X ' Life of Moyes,' by Wilson, p. 172. 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 21 
 
 colours became less intense they decreased in harsh- 
 ness, until green conveyed to him an idea like that 
 which he felt in passing his hand over a polished sur- 
 face. But we suspect that Dr. Moyes was only trying 
 to rival the happy shot of another blind man, who, 
 says Locke, declared that scarlet was to him " like 
 the sound of a trumpet." Trumpets and scarlet go 
 well together, and were perhaps even more frequently 
 heard of and met with seventy or eighty years ago 
 than they are now, and the name of one might well 
 suggest the other. A pupil of Guillie's, at the Paris 
 Blind School, translated rubente dextera, from Horace's 
 Second Ode, by " flaming right hand." Being pressed 
 to translate literally, he gave as an equivalent " red." 
 When asked what he meant by " a red arm" he said 
 that he did not think, like Locke's blind man, that 
 the colour red was like the sound of a trumpet, but 
 he had translated it flaming, because he had been 
 told that fire was red ; whence he concluded that heat 
 is accompanied by redness ; which determined him to 
 mark the anger of Jupiter by the epithet flaming, 
 because when irritated one is hot, and when hot one 
 must be red. 
 
 Touch, therefore, which can do so much for the 
 blind workman, can do nothing for him here ; but 
 
22 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE — 
 
 Chap. I. 
 
 nevertheless, as the Great Exhibition proved, he can 
 weave you a rug bright with all the colours of the 
 rainbow, exactly after the pattern which you pre- 
 scribe: scroll-work, leaves, fruit, flowers, lozenges, 
 stars, or cross-bars, In the first place, his threads of 
 wool are all placed for him by his side, in one exact 
 order, say white, crimson, blue, yellow, and maroon. 
 They are always in the same order and place, so that 
 he takes up whichever he needs with unerring cer- 
 tainty. Hung up to the beam in front of him, but 
 easily within reach of his fingers, is a square of 
 smooth, thin deal, on which is traced the pattern of 
 his rug in nails with heads of every possible variety 
 of shape — round, square, diamond-shape, or tri- 
 
 angular ; tacks, brads, and buttons ; some driven 
 home to the surface of the board, others raised one^ 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 23 
 
 tenth of an inch above it ; but all telling their own' 
 story of red, green, white or blue. The board is 
 ruled thus with cross-bar lines, and at every point 
 of intersection a small hole is bored, into which is 
 slipped a nail with its head square, round, or tri- 
 angular, as the pattern requires. The boy reads his 
 pattern along the horizontal lines from left to right, 
 and. according to the teaching of the nails weaves in 
 the gay scroll-work of brilliant colours as deftly as if 
 he saw every tint. A glance at the above cut will 
 show the first line of a nail pattern ; O standing for 
 red, £ for white, Q for blue, • for maroon, and X 
 for green ; for the arrangement of which in due order 
 the weaver has of course to depend on his teacher 
 with eyes. But if his touch is keen, and his finger 
 not hardened by work, his pattern can be set for him 
 in a far easier and simpler shape by the help of a few 
 embossed letters and figures on a sheet of thick 
 paper. The line of nails in the above cut translated 
 into letters, would run thus, B standing for red, D for 
 white, C for blue, A for maroon, and E for green : — 
 
 B.3 : D.l. C.l. B.l. 0.2. B.2. D.l. B.4. A.2. D.l. 0.4. B.2 A.7. B.3. 
 
 These letters and figures the blind weaver quickly 
 reads with his finger; and then readily takes from 
 
24 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE - 
 
 Chap. I. 
 
 his row of arranged colours the number of threads 
 or strands requisite to bring to light those curious 
 
 THE BLIND WEAVER. 
 
 flowers that grow in the meadows of carpet-land ; or 
 the still more curious squares, triangles, lozenges, 
 curves, and scrolls, that crop out among the blossoms ; 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 25 
 
 weaving on, unconsciously, yet correctly, in the dark, 
 with quiet, patient skill that well deserves the word 
 of praise from his teacher for which he gladly looks. 
 Touch, then, which does so much for the blind 
 boy, will not do everything; it will not distinguish 
 colours ; as the eye of the deaf-mute can never hear, 
 so the fingers of the blind can never see. Locke, 
 Condillac, and Molineux, indeed, once disputed warmly 
 whether a man restored to sight could distinguish a 
 cube from a globe with his eye, although he might 
 have done so by touch when blind. Locke thought 
 that he could not, the fact being that the power of 
 vision in such cases is extremely faulty, and has to 
 be regularly educated till it gradually becomes accu- 
 rate and trustworthy. " I can't understand," said a 
 clever blind man, " how things can be seen to be 
 round or square, all at once, without passing the 
 fingers over them." And, beyond a doubt, the whole 
 question of seeing is, to a man born blind, more or 
 less of a mystery. Even Saunderson, genius as he 
 was, only got as far as to conceive that "the art 
 of seeing was similar to that of a series of threads 
 being drawn from the distant object to the eye." 
 The cessation of resistance may be to the touch of 
 a blind boy what " the cessation of colour is to the 
 
26 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. L 
 
 eye of the seeing ; " * but it was no mean authority 
 who said, " Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit 
 in sensu," and the words apply with double force in the 
 present instance. Where, therefore, touch fails him, 
 he can gain little external help, and may presently 
 be altogether at sea. Things apparently identical in 
 form may differ in size, and differing in size, may 
 also totally differ in essence and in nature ; and of 
 this difference he may be wholly unconscious. He 
 may form, and does form, the most outrageously in- 
 correct ideas on some common matters, though he 
 may continually amuse and surprise you by clever 
 guesses, or gleams of what seems like intuition. Du 
 Puiseaux, the son of a Professor of Philosophy in the 
 University of Paris, was in some things one of the 
 shrewdest men of his day, having attained consider- 
 able proficiency in botany and chemistry ; but he was 
 blind. He had a wonderful memory for sounds, and 
 could, it is said, recognise by their voice persons 
 whom he had only once heard. He could tell if he 
 was in a street or a blind alley, in a large room or a 
 small one ; but he believed that astronomers were the 
 only people who saw with telescopes, and that they 
 
 Guillie, p. 73. 
 
Chap. I. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 27 
 
 had their eyes differently formed from other men. 
 Nor was his notion about eyes in general a whit less 
 incorrect. " The eye," said he, " is an organ on which 
 the air should have the same effect as my stick on 
 my hand."* The boy upon whom Cheselden ope- 
 rated for cataract, had clearly been of the same 
 opinion. Even when restored to sight, he believed 
 that the objects he looked on touched his eyes, as 
 those which he felt touched his skin ; and he conse- 
 quently had no true idea of distance. He asked 
 " which was the sense that deceived him, the sight or 
 the touch?"f He wondered how a likeness of his 
 father's face could be got into so small a space as 
 his mother's watch-case ; it seemed to him as impos- 
 sible as getting a bushel into a pint measure. It took 
 him some time to learn to distinguish between the 
 dog and the cat, until he had felt them over care- 
 fully with his own hand. It is not to be wondered 
 
 * Guillie, p. 56. 
 
 t Speaking of the education of the sense of touch, Sydney Smith 
 whimsically conjectures as to the possibility of educating the taste 
 and smell to an equal degree of keenness. As the blind child feels 
 certain marks raised on paper, which he calls ABC, why should not 
 the alphabet be taught by a series of well-contrived flavours ? Why 
 should not men smell out their learning, and why should there not 
 be a fine scenting-day for study ? — Lectures on Moral Philosophy, 
 p. 62. 
 
28 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. I. 
 
 at, therefore, that when some one asked Du Puiseaux 
 if he " would not be very glad to have his sight ?" he 
 replied, " If it were not for curiosity, I would rather 
 have long arms ; it seems to me that my hands would 
 teach me better what is passing in the moon than 
 your eyes or telescopes;* and, besides, the eyes cease 
 to see sooner than the hands to touch. It would 
 therefore be as well to improve the organ I have, as 
 to give me the one I want." Abundant evidence of 
 a similar kind might still be adduced, but this seems 
 enough to prove that even among educated blind 
 people there must be a large section of the physical 
 and metaphysical world of which their idea is to a 
 great extent vague and incorrect. Such must their 
 notions be of space, and wide distance, and, to some 
 extent, of size ; of such phrases as " the expanse of 
 ocean," " the broad bosom of the teeming earth," or 
 "the starlit canopy of heaven." It is more than 
 doubtful whether they can form any even tolerably 
 accurate idea of such an object as Salisbury spire.f 
 
 * Quite in a different sense, says Shelley, " God has given men 
 arms long enough to reach the stars, if they would only stretch them 
 out." 
 
 f "A blind man," says Winslow, " walking through a lofty cathe- 
 dral is really unconscious of aught about him save the coldness of 
 the air, and the stone pavement." 
 
Chap. I. THEIE WORKS AND WAYS. 29 
 
 It would be easy to tire our friend little Johnny's 
 legs by making him mount to the summit of St, 
 Paul's, but amazingly hard when there to give him 
 any true notion of his height above the wilderness of 
 smoky house-tops below. If perched on the top of 
 the cross, like Holman the blind traveller on Adam's 
 Peak in Ceylon, he might exult in his lofty position, 
 and draw in new life from the mighty rush of air 
 about him ; but he would be utterly unconscious of 
 the foggy depths all round, and the fearful calamity 
 of a single false step. In the very climax of supreme 
 peril, with all his timidity and nervous fear, he might 
 actually seem fearless; proving once more the old 
 adage, " What the eye doesn't see, the mind doesn't 
 fear;" and reminding us of Blind Metcalf, who 
 planned and made some of the wildest roads across 
 the Peak, and was the safest guide through them to 
 be had for love or money. 
 
30 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE- 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 31 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 VTEXT in importance to the sense of touch comes 
 -*"" that of hearing. The blind boy knows the step 
 of his friend in a trice, decides quickly or even in- 
 stantly which way that step is moving ; and, if it be 
 coming towards him, exactly at what angle to ran 
 across the room or yard to meet it. He will even 
 distinguish a certain footstep, at times, among others, 
 especially if it be one that he either loves or fears. 
 Let us glance for a moment into the Basket-shop in 
 St. George's Fields. It is a large and lofty room, 
 some 20 feet wide by 150 feet long, aud in it are now 
 at work on basket-making full fifty boys and men. 
 There is generally a teacher, with sight, at either end 
 of the room ; but one is now just gone to fetch some 
 osiers from another part of the building. Our friend 
 little Trotter is at work halfway down the room, but 
 has met with some trifling difficulty not to be solved 
 
32 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. -II. 
 
 without his teacher's help. The fifty boys and men 
 are almost all talking as they work, or perhaps hum- 
 ming a tune, or beating their work with a bar of iron ; 
 and some are crossing the room in search of tools, 
 help, or advice ; so that, altogether, the scene is full 
 of noisy life, and as unlike a shop full of blind people 
 as may well be imagined. But, in the midst of all 
 the noise, Trotter sits quietly waiting ; he knows that 
 the master went out of the room five minutes ago (he 
 will tell you that he saw him go), and, though several 
 persons have since come in at that door, he knows 
 that his teacher is not one of the few. All at once 
 he starts up, as the door shuts with a bang — and the 
 pupil walks quickly up the room,* in a direct line, as 
 if he saw the table at which his teacher now sits. As 
 he goes back to his place another person enters by 
 the same door, and makes his way hastily towards 
 the other end; but he has not gone a dozen steps 
 before more than one voice among the basket-makers 
 is heard to whisper, " Here comes the Chaplain," or 
 " There goes Brown." 
 
 * If any one with, sight imagines this to be an easy matter, let 
 him shut his eyes when 40 yards from, and opposite to, his own door, 
 and make the rest of his journey in the dark. The chances are 
 1000 to 1 against his arriving anywhere near the well-known 
 threshold. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WOEKS AND WAYS. 33 
 
 Or, glance into the same room an hour later, and 
 the whole scene is changed. The bell has rung for 
 leaving off work ; but, as it is a wet wintry day, some 
 fifty or sixty of the pupils are here under shelter, 
 walking two-and-two, arm-in-arm, round the room, 
 whistling, chatting, singing, or shouting most up- 
 roariously — but all promenading as methodically, and 
 evenly, as if every one there had sight. Not a single 
 boy ever strays out of his rank, no one runs against 
 his neighbour ; though, at the first glance, it appears 
 only like a noisy and confused crowd. There are 
 three doors to the shop, one at either end, and one in 
 the centre; every two minutes some boy darts out 
 from the crowd, or rushes in to join it, by that middle 
 door ; but in neither case does he jostle friend or foe. 
 Here comes Trotter himself. He is in search of his 
 friend Jones, who, driven in by the rain, left him ten 
 minutes ago at the swing, and is now the solitary 
 unit in the long chain of couples. As tramp by 
 tramp it works its slow way past the door where he 
 stands, Trotter, " with his face all eye," * watches to 
 pounce on his friend as he goes by. In spite of all 
 the din he hears him when some yards off, seizes on 
 
 Coleridge ' Biog. Lit.' 
 
84 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 his arm, as if he saw it passing, and away they go, 
 to join steadily in that jolly unbroken march till the 
 glad sound of 
 
 " That tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell " 
 
 send them flying out into the colonnade to muster 
 for cold beef, bread, and beer. Stand still for a 
 moment, and you will hear the deep roll of their 
 chanted grace, with its pealing Amen ; if not quite 
 so smooth and rounded a cadence as it might be, 
 at least with a deal of heart and reality in its 
 final chord. While they are at dinner we will 
 glance into one or two of the work-rooms, now 
 silent and empty enough. This on the left, under 
 the archway, is the Brush-shop, fitted up with a 
 central table and forms, on one side the teacher's 
 bench, and on the others a longer bench cut up 
 into little sections, each fitted with drawers and 
 tools for learners, all precisely as if the workmen 
 had sight. In this room are made, entirely by 
 blind boys under a sighted teacher, brushes of 
 almost every possible description. After 6 p.m. this 
 shop serves as a Club-room for the Upper Twenty ; 
 here they play chess or draughts, emboss letters 
 to country friends, or now and then, if lucky enough 
 to get hold of a stray teacher, listen to the pages 
 
Chap. II. 
 
 THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 35 
 
 of some special book. In the drawers of the centre 
 table are now locked up the boards for draughts, 
 bagatelle, or chess ; all curious enough in their 
 
 THE BLIND BOYS CHESS-BOARD. 
 
 way, but which space will not. permit us to do 
 more than mention. A good game of chess will 
 last a month or six weeks.* Work-room No. 2 
 
 * Sir Kenelm Digby says, in his ' Treatise on Bodies,' " that his 
 sou's tutor, a blind man, could beat the cleverest players of that 
 day."— p. 17 ; ed. 1660. 
 
 . A small point on the top of the men e.g. A distinguish-s for the 
 blind boy his opponent's pieces from his own. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 is the Mat-shop, much larger and loftier than No. 1, 
 and fitted with mat-frames and looms, all of the 
 ordinary kind. Here are made rugs, mats, and 
 miles of cocoa-nut matting, of every texture, quality, 
 and pattern. Dainty little mats of the finest wool 
 or fibre, fringed with pink or white for a boudoir, or 
 thick and gigantic enough for Brobdignag ; tri- 
 angular, square, or oblong, to fit into the bottom 
 of a carriage, or the corner of a hall ; thin enough 
 for the door to swing over without brushing, 
 or thick enough for the boots of a regiment of 
 Grenadiers. 
 
 As we cross the open yard from the mat-shop, 
 the boys and men are coming out from dinner, and 
 at once diverge in all directions ; some three or 
 four off to the swings, some to the range of music- 
 rooms above the workshop, in each of which is 
 a piano to be diligently sounded till 6 p.m. ; some 
 for a stroll round the grass-plat, and one or two 
 to the club-room ; but each and every one going 
 on his way as calmly and clearly as if he saw 
 every inch of it mapped out before him ; never 
 running against friend or foe, never stumbling over 
 door-step, and rarely missing the handle of the 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 37 
 
 door for which he steers.* As we thread our way, 
 however, through the noisy, straggling crowd, our 
 irregular, unbusiness-like style of march is suddenly 
 interrupted by a shot across the bows in the shape 
 of a loud "holloa!" — as much as to say, "Who 
 goes there ? and why don't you look where you're 
 going ? " Our best answer to this shot is to stand 
 still until most of the cruisers have swept by ; and 
 then — with one more peep into the brush-shop, 
 which, till work begins again at 2 p.m., serves as 
 a sort of house of call — we will quit this part of 
 our , subject. Our friend Trotter has just set off 
 in a great hurry for that door-way ; he seizes the 
 handle, opens the door hastily, shouts out one or 
 two lusty words, waits for no answer, but rushes 
 off again elsewhere. Ask him what this pantomime 
 means, and he will tell you that he was in quest 
 of a certain trio of boys who promised to meet 
 him there ; that he " looked " into the club-room 
 and found that they were not there; at least he 
 thinks not, as, judging by the sound of his own 
 
 * Tom Wilson, the blind bell-ringer of Dumfries, was famous for 
 cleverness of this kind. " His first visit every morning was to the 
 belfry, and on his way to it he tripped up the stone steps as quickly 
 and certainly as if possessed of the keenest sight, key in hand, and 
 rarely missing the keyhole at the first trial." 
 
38 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 foot against the form on which they usually sit, 
 and of his own voice, the room seemed empty. 
 And empty it really is. The well known story 
 told by Mr. Anderson of a blind messenger at 
 Edinburgh, entirely corroborates this fact. "I had 
 occasion," he says, "to send out one of two blind 
 men with a mattress. I gave him the bill with 
 it, that he might receive payment. But, to my 
 surprise, he returned with the account and the 
 mattress too. 'I've brought back baith, ye see, 
 Sir,' said he. ' How so ? ' ' Indeed, Sir, I didna 
 like t' leave 't yonder, else I'm sure we wad ne'er 
 see the siller — there's nae a stick of furniture within 
 the door!' 'How do you come to know that?' 
 'Oh, Sir, twa taps on the floor wi' my stick soon 
 tell't me that ! ' " And true enough was the guess ; 
 for guess it must still be called, though in both 
 the cases cited it was shrewd enough to pass for 
 wit. The eye itself is educated. "It sees," says 
 Garlyle, "what it brings power to see." Thus, the 
 sailor at the mast-head descries a ship where the 
 landsman sees nothing: the Esquimaux detects a 
 white fox amid white snow; the astronomer a star 
 where others see only an expanse of misty light. 
 The blind boy educates his senses of touch and 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 39 
 
 hearing into a state of exceeding acuteness, till 
 they almost begin to atone to him for that one 
 which is denied; though, after all, they cannot 
 do for him what a single ray of vision would do 
 by one swift glance. "It's a long time before you 
 learns to be blind," said a shrewd old blind woman. 
 And as the education of the eye in darkness is 
 slow, so also it 'appears to be even in light, in the 
 few cases of restored sight which are on record. 
 "Light," says De Quincy, "in its final plenitude is 
 calculated to dispel all darkness. But this effect 
 belongs to its consummation. In its earlier and 
 struggling states light does but reveal darkness. 
 No sooner has this early twilight begun to solicit 
 the creative faculties of the eye, than dusky objects 
 with outlines imperfectly denned begin to converge 
 the eye, and strengthen the nascent interest of 
 the spectator. Light thus makes darkness palpable 
 and visible ; as in a gloomy glass-house, where 
 the sullen lustre from the furnace does but mass 
 and accumulate the thick darkness in the rear upon 
 which the moving figures are relieved." It is only 
 by dint of long experience, and after an infinite 
 series of mistakes — of many of which he is uncon- 
 scious — that the blind boy manages to see with his 
 
40 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 fingers,* and now and then to do more than hear 
 with his ears; but a shrewd boy of his own age, 
 with a good pair of eyes, will give him twenty or 
 thirty in every hundred yards, and yet win the race. 
 A blind boy's face may be, as Coleridge describes 
 it, "all eye," and learn to beam with brightest 
 intelligence ; he may be an apt scholar where many 
 a youngster fails ; his remaining senses, if rightly 
 trained, seem, by that merciful law which rules 
 God's kingdom, to put forth new blossom and 
 fruit as every year rolls by, to be gifted with 
 new vigour and keener life, and thus save him 
 from the full pang of knowing all his loss ; and 
 yet, the result if tried sharply will too often be 
 found imperfect and incomplete. It has been 
 up-hill work all the way through, accomplished 
 only by incessant and patient toil, by perseverance 
 and unwearied ingenuity, and on this ground ad- 
 mirable and worthy of praise. For though Huber, 
 in spite of the darkness about him, managed to 
 make and to record many striking discoveries in 
 the domestic life of Ants and Bees, he would 
 
 * A shop-man in Bokhara had in his shop 16 kinds of tea, all 
 which he distinguished, entirely by the touch." — p. 180, Vdmlery's 
 ' Central Asia.' 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 41 
 
 probably have done far more with his own eyes 
 than with those of his faithful servant, or even 
 of his clever and sparkling little wife Marie Lullin.* 
 And had Didymus of Alexandria, the friend of 
 Iiufinus and Isidore, a.d. 350, mathematician, lin- 
 guist, and theologian, not been blind, he would 
 have left behind him far more trace than a slight 
 mention in the pages of his famous pupil St. Jerome. 
 Saunderson would have left behind him some im- 
 perishable record of his genius ; his manhood would 
 have been saved from many an excess, and his 
 old age have been preserved from the deadly 
 taint of scepticism. John Stanley, the organist 
 of St. Andrew's, Holborn t (1730), to whose playing 
 Handel often listened with delight, would have 
 been known to all England. Blacklock might have 
 written poetry instead of rhyme of the mildest 
 
 * Vide Life at p. 141. 
 
 t So great was Stanley's skill that he is said on one occasion, 
 when the other instruments were too sharp for the organ, to have- 
 transposed one of Handel's " Te Deums " into the unusual key 
 of C jf niHJor ; and lhat, too, at sight, without time for premedi- 
 tation. James Strong, a Blind Musician of Carlisle, made every 
 article of his own attire, as well as his household furniture. 
 It was in 1752 that he specially made himself a pair of shoes, 
 and walked from Carlisle to London to hear Stanley play at St. 
 Andrew's. 
 
42 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 order,* and a host of would-be poets, philosophers, 
 musicians, and prosers, would never have afflicted 
 mankind with various melancholy performances. 
 
 So far, therefore, for some of the difficulties and 
 obstacles which blindness entails. It is time now 
 to glance at one or two special advantages which 
 it is commonly supposed to confer. Cut off as 
 the blind man is, in a measure, from the rest of 
 the world, and from many channels of light and 
 information open to others, his isolation is said 
 to give him special power and aptitude for the 
 study of abstract things : of philosophy and of 
 mathematics. And the assertion will, to some 
 extent, hold good. A wounded finger will make 
 a man careful in handling edged tools, he will be 
 more skilful than he was; a man who falls and 
 breaks his leg, walks more warily ever after ; but 
 neither wound nor fracture is the cause of skill 
 or safety. So with blindness; it must first be 
 regarded as a loss. It isolates a man, no doubt ; 
 when he wishes to think, it saves him from the 
 intrusion of external objects and the busy crowd 
 
 * Guillie, in his ' Essays,' amusingly says of Blackloek, " In Eng- 
 land he is considered a great poet." 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 43 
 
 of ideas which wait about on the world of visible 
 things; it may free him from some illusions of 
 the senses, and the snares of outside appearance ; 
 he easily becomes abstracted, where a man with 
 sight would often find it hard : so far, therefore, 
 his way towards deep, inward, thought is cleared ; 
 wind and tide seem in his favour. But he must 
 know how to manage the sails, and to steer the 
 ship; he must have clear power of thought, and 
 be trained to use it; be able to concentrate his 
 attention on the given idea, and willing to work 
 at it ; or his own peculiar world will steal in upon 
 him— the things which he can handle, taste, and 
 hear ; the things which feed his appetites, or gratify 
 his passions ; his amusements, pleasures, and regrets ; 
 his failures, peculiar sorrows, trials, and disappoint- 
 ments. If the blind boy has courage and moral 
 strength to banish these intruders, " the doors of Geo- 
 metry may open to him on an oily hinge," the fatal 
 "Pons Asinorum" may be easily crossed, and the 
 silent domains of metaphysical speculation invite and 
 gratify his careful, inquisitive approach. So acutely 
 has this been felt in every age, and so favourite 
 has the dogma become, that more than one philo- 
 sopher is said to have plunged himself into darkness 
 
44 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 for the very purpose of more intense, abstract, 
 thought. We can readily believe that Malebranche 
 may, with this object, have closed his shutters 
 against the daylight; that Bourdaloue preached 
 eloquently,* or Diderot reasoned acutely, with his 
 eyes shut: this might happen to such ordinary 
 mortals as "Jones" at Clapham thinking out his 
 Sunday sermon, or "Robinson" in Capel Court 
 speculating on the possible contingencies of settling 
 day. Shutters are readily unclosed, eyes are easily 
 opened. But when we readf that Democritus, 
 of Abdera, put out his eyes for the purpose of 
 philosophizing, we begin to doubt. In the first 
 place, Democritus was hardly the man to cut himself 
 totally off from all the sights of folly, show, and 
 care that he rejoiced to laugh at, though a poet has 
 said of him — 
 
 " ad ridendum curas et inania mimdi 
 Splenis Democritus non satis unus habet." 
 
 An hour's darkness he might have chuckled over, 
 
 * " God be praised," said an old woman to Dr. Guyse, her 
 minister, who had suddenly become blind, — " God be praised that 
 your sight is gone. You're more powerful than ever, now ye've no 
 notes." 
 
 t Guillie', quoting Diderot, p. 53. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 45 
 
 but a lifetime is a totally different thing.* Cicero, 
 who is always dragged in as a witness on this point, 
 says nothing to corroborate such a view. His words 
 simply are : " Demoeritus impediri etiam animi actem 
 aspedu oculorum arbitrabatur ; " t clearly meaning 
 nothing more than that Demoeritus, like any other 
 Abderite philosopher of his day, now and then put 
 up his shutters in the blazing weather, or perhaps 
 dreamed for an hour with his eyes closed. Next 
 we -have Diodotus, the Stoic, Cicero's master in 
 philosophy, who, when he became blind, is said 
 to have applied himself to mathematics with greater 
 success than ever, and become famous as a teacher ; 
 and this probably because he worked harder in 
 the darkness than in the light. Every year doubt- 
 less gave acuteness to his inner sight, keenness to 
 his touch, and possibly eloquence to his words, — 
 yet, not in consequence of his blindness, but in spite 
 of it. So, also, Tiheckius, of Thorndorf, who taught 
 medicine and philosophy with success for thirteen 
 years at Tubingen, and becoming blind in the 
 
 * Milton, who only knew half its bitterness, calls it 
 " To live half-dead, a living death.' 
 
 — Samson Agonistes, 39. 
 t 'Tusc. Disp., v. 39. 
 
46 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 fourteenth year, is said to have refused the help 
 of an oculist who offered to restore his sight. 
 Perhaps he knew the oculist to be an impostor, 
 and his sight once gone to be irrecoverable ; in 
 any case, he was a humourist, and we can quite 
 believe him when he said, "he had seen many 
 things in his life which he would rather not have 
 seen, and on some occasions had even wished that 
 he were deaf." Which of us, if he spoke truthfully, 
 would not agree with the philosopher of Tubingen ? 
 Bat this is a very different thing from arguing 
 that loss of sight gave him increased skill or wisdom 
 in "healing the bodies or minds of his fellow men. 
 The truth is, he was doctor enough to know that 
 his loss was irreparable, and philosopher enough 
 to make the best of it. It was in much the same 
 spirit that Du Puiseaux used to say, " he was always 
 meeting with seeing persons of inferior intelligence 
 to himself." 
 
 It has been well said that "the strength that 
 is in a man can only be learnt when he is thrown 
 upon his own resources and left alone ; " * and the 
 isolation of the blind man no doubt thus forces 
 
 Kobertson's Sermons. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 47 
 
 him to make the most of his strength, and brings 
 to the surface, often into living play, his highest 
 and best powers ; — but it must not be forgotten 
 that the darkness which isolates him, and saves 
 him from the intrusion of unwelcome images, tends 
 also to narrow the vision which it concentrates. 
 He rarely, if ever, takes a broad view of things. 
 If he thinks intently on any given point, he fails 
 to see, or is apt to forget, some one other of 
 equal weight and close at hand. This makes him 
 one-sided, and ready to hug his own judgment 
 to the very death; slow to receive the opinion 
 of others, captious as well as cautious, a temper 
 which easily hardens into naiTow prejudice. These 
 are heavy drawbacks to the supposed advantages 
 of ready abstraction and aptitude for metaphysics. 
 Nor are they to be wondered at, when we consider 
 from what infinite sources of beauty, grace, and 
 truth the blind man is cut off. To him are un- 
 known all the countless evidences of an Almighty 
 hand which to all other men speak from earth, 
 sea, and sky ; the smooth and immeasurable expanse 
 of summer seas, the silent grandeur of the blue 
 sky above, with all its wealth of palaces and towers 
 of fleecy cloud, the golden glory of morning, the 
 
48 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 gorgeous dying splendour of setting suns, the soft 
 haze of twilight, the solemn watches of starlit 
 night, the living, speaking beauty of the wide- 
 spread landscape,* the flowing sweep of the ever- 
 lasting hills, the proud, calm majesty of snow-clad 
 mountains, the green and purple outline of the 
 forest, the beauty of waving corn, and the grace 
 of flowers, of sloping valley, and of winding stream, 
 
 " And all the thousand sights that crown this earth with joy." 
 
 No description can paint these things for the blind 
 man more than words can paint music for the 
 deaf-mute. But even above all these, is the loss 
 to him of all the infinite grace and beauty of the 
 human face. Who shall tell him of the tender 
 love that beams from a mother's eye, or the rippling 
 
 * The youth restored to sight by Cheselden -when brought to a 
 wide prospect of hill and dale, called it " a new kind of seeing." — 
 Philosoph. Trans. 
 
 Nothing, indeed, can be more striking or solemn than the first 
 sight of a mountainous country to one used to the sleepy flatness of 
 the plain. The abruptness and audacity of the whole scene, the 
 swelling magnitude of nature, the appearances of convulsion, the 
 magnificent disorder and ruin, astonish a feeling mind : " filling it 
 with grand images, rousing its dormant life, and telling those made 
 orators and poets that it is time to fulfil the noble purpose of their 
 birth." — Sydney Smith, ' Lectures,' p. 89. 
 
 But to this touching appeal, and to the whole world of kindred 
 associations, the blind man is actually dead. 
 
Chap. II. THEIE WORKS AND WAYS. 49 
 
 sunshine that lights up the face of a happy, 
 laughing child? The rosy brightness of the lips 
 that kiss him, of the cheek which offers a ruddy 
 welcome at his coming, the saucy smile of a dimpled 
 chin, or the rapture of sudden joy that beams 
 from every feature? To Mm all this beauty and 
 all this joy are but a darkened, dreary blank. 
 And though he may be unconscious of the greatness 
 of his loss, it is hard to exaggerate the gain — 
 
 " Since light so necessary is to life, 
 Nay almost life itself — " * 
 
 which light brings to the rest of the world. " There 
 are," says Pascal, "two infinities that lie round 
 about man, the worlds revealed by the telescope 
 and the microscope, and these appeal to the depths 
 of wonder and awe within him ; a noble and 
 lofty appeal, of which he who cannot "see is utterly 
 unconscious."! It is true that "a life of religion 
 
 * ' Samson Agonistes,' 90. 
 
 t It is urged, indeed, that Saundersnn must have formed most 
 accurate ideas of space, or he could not have reasoned on Geometry 
 as he has done. It is impossible to limit the achievements of such a 
 genius as his, and say exactly what it may or may not do. It is 
 enough to say that there is but one Saunderson on record, and cen- 
 turies may elapse before we meet with another. 
 
 "To the blind man," says Hauy, "the visible world is totally 
 annihilated ; he is perfectly conscious of no space but that in which 
 he stands, to which his extremities can reach." 
 
 E 
 
50 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 is a life of faith, and faith is that faculty by 
 which man feels the presence of the invisible, 
 exactly as some animals have the power of seeing 
 in the dark;" and it would seem, at first, as if 
 the blind man by his very affliction might be 
 the more open to its power, and thus learn to 
 make "loss his highest gain." But, unhappily, 
 having too often no true knowledge of Light, he 
 has no true knowledge of the darkness which hems 
 him in, nor of the mighty purpose it is meant 
 to serve. It is to him but a cold, hard, dead 
 loss, which, unless he be roused out of the gloom, 
 and taught to find light in it— in tenebris servare 
 fidem — may shatter or dwarf his whole mental and 
 spiritual powers, and point the way to doubt, 
 distrust, or denial of Him to whom darkness and 
 light are both alike. It is said to have been so 
 in the case of more than one famous blind man. 
 When Saunderson lay dying he sent for a clergy- 
 man, one Dr. Holmes, who seems, however, to have 
 brought him little comfort ; so far at least as 
 Diderot's manifestly imperfect account tells what 
 really passed. As death drew nigh, the great 
 shadow which had darkened all the sick man's 
 life grew deeper and darker. He began to doubt, 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 51 
 
 once more, the existence of his Creator. "If," said 
 he, "you would have me believe in God, I must 
 feel him." "Touch then your own frame," was 
 the reply, "and find G-od there in His noble 
 handiwork." "All this," said the dying mathema- 
 tician, "may be very well for you, but it is not 
 so for me ; what relation is there between his 
 handiwork and God? You call everything you 
 cannot understand a wonder, and therefore divine. 
 I myself am a wonder ; people come from all parts 
 of England to see me. Every phenomenon, you 
 say, is from God. Why not have a little less 
 pride, and a little more philosophy in your talk 
 and reasoning?" To this thrust the worthy Doctor 
 seems to have made no adequate reply, but proceeds 
 to set before him the examples of Newton, Leibnitz, 
 and Clarke, men of profound thought and acute 
 reason, who were nevertheless believers in Chris- 
 tianity. "This," replied Saunderson, "is strong 
 evidence, but not strong enough for me; the 
 testimony of Newton cannot be to me what all 
 Nature is to Newton;" a remark which appears 
 to have closed that part of the conversation. But 
 the patient again rallied, and returning to his old 
 vein of thought, rambled off to discuss the present 
 
 e 2 
 
52 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 state of the world. " It is," said he, " I will allow, 
 at present what you describe it to be, a world of 
 order and method, in which certain laws and order 
 hold good and prevail ; but, as to the most primitive 
 times, the first beings who then lived may have 
 been utter monsters, without the higher functions, 
 nay, without stomachs, and the universe about 
 them a mere chaos. There are informous things 
 enough in the world even now. For example, 
 I have no eyes ; what had either you or I done 
 to God, that one of us should have that organ, 
 and the other be without it?"* As he uttered 
 these sad words, an earnest, solemn, and deep 
 concern spread over his whole face, as if the 
 terrible problem that had haunted him all his life 
 long and received no solution, to the very last 
 was to be unsolved by the dying man. He had, 
 as yet, drawn neither hope nor comfort from the 
 Master's words: "neither hath this man sinned nor 
 his parents;" and though he had found for his 
 hand a great and worthy work, had never learned 
 to do it to a greater glory than his own. As he 
 
 * Saunderson's belief in God seems to have been as bairen to him 
 as atheism itself; " for it were better to have no opinion of God at 
 all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him." Bcuxm. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 53 
 
 grew weaker, his thoughts became more confused, 
 and his words less coherent. He spoke only a 
 intervals, but once again rambled back to the 
 cloudland of doubt, " The world Eternal ? so it seems 
 to you, as you are eternal to the insect." Again, 
 after a - silence — " Time, matter, space, are but a 
 point. I am going whither we must all go. Let 
 there be no lamentation or mourning; it is a pain 
 to me." And then, last of all, came the yet sadder 
 cry of agony, "God of Newton, give me light!" 
 as the shadows were all coming to an end, and 
 the great mystery of life was about to be unlocked 
 in the things unseen and eternal. We must hope 
 that his last despairing cry to the Being, of whose 
 existence he just before seemed to doubt, was heard 
 in the very agony of his need. 
 
 The whole picture, even in the words of sneering 
 Diderot, from which it is mainly condensed, is full 
 of touching interest ; and though it may perhaps 
 exaggerate the weary clouds which sometimes beset 
 the death-bed of the blind man, it may be taken as a 
 type of what may to some degree befall him if not 
 well-trained in early youth. " The world is too much 
 with " him ; and though " heaven," too, " lies round 
 about him in his infancy," he is unconscious of 
 
54 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 it. But once rouse him from this unconsciousness, 
 only convince him that he has his place in the 
 world, and that He who gives to kings and beggars 
 alike their place and work, has given work, a 
 place, and ability to him, and the whole scene 
 begins to change. Light begins to steal in — 
 
 " The sense of Power is freedom, warmth, and light ; 
 The sense of Weakness, gloom and chains and blight. 
 The sense of Power is Life's immortal breath ; 
 The sense of Weakness is the touch of death — " * 
 
 and the youth who once fancied that life was but 
 a dreary blank, without hope, meaning, or use, soon 
 — perhaps too soon — appears to think his abilities 
 of the very highest order. In music he will rival 
 Mendelssohn or Mozart, and ou1>sing Incledon or 
 Braham ; in poetry equal Milton ; and in the making 
 of baskets vie with the deftest craftsman in Green- 
 hithe.f These amusing little conceits the world 
 soon takes out of him, and by and by the residuum 
 is the very useful and honest amount of self-con- 
 fidence, without which the keenest sight and the 
 shrewdest ability are too often apt to fail. It is 
 this consciousness of power which inspires genius 
 
 * Fraser. 
 
 t Greenhithe, the head-quarters of the basket-makers. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 55 
 
 itself. It was this which led Milton, smitten clown 
 as he was in the full power and flush of his genius,* 
 to say in his darkened estate — 
 
 " Yet I argue not 
 Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot 
 Of heart, or hope, but still bear up and steer 
 Right onward." — Sonnet to Cyriac Skinner. 
 
 These are the opening words of one of his finest Son- 
 nets, and form one of the few passages in which he 
 alludes, to his blindness. The concluding line in 
 another sonnet, which he wrote soon after this — in 
 memory of his wife — 
 
 "I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night," 
 
 leads us to another point immediately connected with 
 the one which we have been discussing, and that is, 
 how the blind man dreams. Milton, of course, having 
 but just lost his sight, dreamed precisely as other 
 
 * Blindness befel him in his 42nd year ; but he can never rightly 
 be counted a blind man, for his stores of learning were then all laid 
 up, his powers matured, and his genius was all in its pride of 
 strength, though he certainly wrote by far the greater part of his 
 ' Paradise Lost ' after his sight was gone. He became totally blind 
 in 1652, and the poem was finished at Chalfont in 1665, where he 
 had taken refuge from the plague. The opening sublime passage on 
 Light, in Book III., proves at least that from Book II. the poem was 
 written in " darkness." 
 
56 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 men dream — the remembrance of the visible world 
 
 being still with him bright and vivid as before; 
 
 though he himself says — 
 
 " The face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight 
 Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined." 
 
 But into the vision of the blind boy no visible image 
 from the outer world, no shape of beauty, no ghastly 
 form of horror, can possibly enter. Whatever comes 
 to him by night — to him no darker than the day — 
 must come by touch or hearing. " I dream," said a 
 blind boy, " I often dream about people ; I dream of 
 my brother (also blind) ; 1 know he is with me, I 
 hear his voice ; I am in the places where we used to 
 go before he died." " But how do you know that 
 you are in a certain place?" "The impression of 
 the place is with me — I feel I am there ; I am mire 
 I am, sometimes, till I wake. Sometimes I dream 
 that I am walking in the fields ; I tread on the grass, 
 I smell the fresh air." " If I dream," said another 
 young man, " that I am in the great basket-shop, I 
 know -I am there by the size of the room — the length 
 of it." " But how can you judge as to the size or 
 length of what you cannot see?" "Oh! the sound 
 tells me pretty well; I am in my own old place, 
 where I work." " You sit on your box, then ? " " Yes, 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 57 
 
 I touch it, and if the dream goes on I get my tools 
 out." " When I dream," says a blind tramper, " it's 
 just the same as I am now, I dream of hearing and 
 touching. The last dream I had was about a blind 
 man that's in prison just now. I went into his wife's 
 house ; I knew it was hers by the sound of my foot 
 in it, and whether - it was clean or dirty. As we sat 
 talking I heard a voice at the door, and I said, 
 'Bless me, — isn't that John?' But she took no 
 notice. 'Holloa! I said, is that you?' — and I took 
 him by the sleeve ; it was his shirt-sleeves I felt, and 
 I was half afeard of him, and surprised that he should 
 be out weeks before his time. Then (in my dream) 
 I dreamt that he tried to frighten me, and make 
 believe he was a ghost, by pushing me down sideways, 
 &c, &c, after that I waked and heard no more." 
 Here, again, even in his sleep, the sense of touch is 
 his chief agent, motive power, and detective ; and the 
 hapless blind youth, whose powers of hearing and 
 touch are only half-cultivated, or have been left to 
 perish by neglect, is often counted little better than 
 an idiot when awake, while his fancy remains un- 
 stirred even by a dream when asleep. 
 
 The dream, in fact, is but a hard, bare, and indis- 
 tinct fragment of everyday life, untouched by a 
 
58 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. n. 
 
 gleam of fancy or imagination; in both of which 
 qualities the great majority* of the blind are evi- 
 dently deficient. The things which the seeing can 
 touch, hear, or taste, are comparatively few in num- 
 ber, and do little to feed the fancy or to rouse the 
 imagination ; and yet on these alone the great mass 
 of the uneducated blind have mainly to depend. The 
 world of books is all but closed to them ; friends are 
 few, and readers are still more rare. The experience, 
 therefore, of a blind man must be more or less 
 grounded on faith — faith in many things which he 
 can realize but imperfectly, and in some of which he 
 can form no conception. And this, again, tends to 
 harden and petrify the whole tone and habit of his 
 daily life. If, as in the case of Blacklock, he has a 
 turn for versifying, he may produce in abundance 
 feeble imitations of such popular poets as may chance 
 
 * It must not be forgotten that all general remarks of this kind 
 apply only to those who are born blind, or lose their sight in early 
 childhood. Mr. Frantz tells us of a youth whose sight was restored 
 by an operation. While blind he often dreamed of his parents ; he 
 felt them, and heard their voices, but never saw them ; but when 
 once he had seen them with the bodily eye, he beheld them also in 
 his dreams. — Philosophical Trans., 1841. 
 
 " I never dream of my mother," said a blind man to Mayhew 
 (i. 402); "she died, you see, when I was a baby; I can't ever 
 remember hearing her speak." 
 
Chap. II. THBIE WOEKS AND WAYS. 59 
 
 to be read to him, catching here and there a phrase, 
 a cadence, or an echo of the metre ; but for the most 
 part what he writes is absolutely without salt, colour- 
 less to the mental eye, and tasteless to the critical 
 palate. He may have certain ideas of warmth, 
 sound, and society as -belonging to "the day;" of 
 silence, solitude, and melancholy as connected with 
 night ; he may talk of " glory " as belonging to the 
 sun, and " fainter radiance " to the moon. But this, 
 after all, is no proof that he understands the images 
 which he uses, any more than Blacklock did when 
 he assigned " paleness " to grief, " cheerfulness " to 
 green, or chattered of " ruddy " gems and " glowing " 
 roses. He uses such words and phrases pretty much 
 as the school-boy does the adj. "purpureas," which 
 he hunts out of his Gradus as a jolly epithet for 
 " Olor," and "purpureum " for " Mare ; " never per- 
 haps having seen any but white swans or green waves ; 
 and possibly never having had a glimpse of either. 
 A single specimen from Blacklock's loftiest poem will 
 more than suffice to show our meaning : — 
 
 ■■ Arise, my soul ! on wings seraphic rise, 
 And praise the Almighty Sovereign of the skies, 
 In whom alone essential glory shines, 
 Which not the heaven of heavens, nor boundless space 
 confines. 
 
60 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 When darkness ruled with universal sway, 
 
 He spoke, and kindled up the blaze of day ; 
 
 First, fairest offspring of the omnifio word, 
 
 Which like a garment clothed its Sovereign Lord, 
 
 On liquid air he hade the columns rise, 
 
 That prop the starry concave of the skies," &c. &c. 
 
 This is cited by his critics,* themselves blind, as 
 
 something quite Miltonic, "truly sublime," and full 
 
 of "bewitching beauties." So much for his poetry. 
 
 But Blacklock is also claimed as a philosopher ; and 
 
 what his philosophical attainments must have been 
 
 may be easily imagined from his poetical description 
 
 of Aristotle : — 
 
 " The Stagyrite whose fruitful quill 
 O'er free-born nature lords it still, 
 
 Sustained by form and phrase 
 Of dire portent and solemn sound, 
 Where meaning seldom can be found, 
 Prom me shall gain no praise." 
 
 This choice stanza is from his poem entitled ' Re- 
 finements in Metaphysical Philosophy,' and is sup- 
 posed — though it is hard to conceive why — to be in 
 the style of 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' 
 with all Byron's wit and none of his bitterness ! Nor 
 
 * James Wilson, clever and ingenious as he is, and one Mr. B. 
 Bowen, who dates from New York in ' A Blind Man's Offering ' of 
 prose and verse : all very sad stuff. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 61 
 
 can we find anything more encouraging in recent 
 versification by the blind. Such lines, in fact, serve 
 but to show that there is, after all, as much differ- 
 ence between real poetry and mere verse, as between 
 the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop. 
 Even Miss Brown, of Stranorlar, one of the most 
 accomplished of modern blind authors, when she 
 attempts verse, though she has far more real poetic 
 feeling than Blacklock, here and there falls into 
 little inaccuracies to which the Blind are always 
 liable, as where she writes — 
 
 " The lofty palm and cedar blent 
 Their shadows over Jacob's tent ;" 
 
 unconscious, apparently, that trees of so widely dif- 
 ferent a habitat could never unite to throw their 
 shadow on any tent. No doubt any versifier with 
 eyes might, through ignorance, fall into a similar 
 error; but no one who could write such poetry as 
 Miss Brown's, because his education would have 
 saved him from such imperfect knowledge. His 
 acquaintance with geography and natural history 
 would have been of a completer and more practical 
 kind, simply because he had not to depend on other 
 people's eyes and good will for its acquirement, — as 
 must happen in the case of the blind poetess. 
 
62 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 The paucity of books — books "in which lies the 
 soul of the whole past time " — which the blind man 
 can read for himself, and the difficulty of obtaining 
 knowledge from the reading of others must always — 
 but in rare, exceptional cases — make his range of 
 knowledge imperfect. There must, too, always re- 
 main some subjects altogether beyond his ken, the 
 inevitable consequence of his privation. " Blacklock," 
 says Dr. Kitto, " speaks of day and night, light and 
 darkness, view and sight ; of the sun ; and of the 
 flashing, gleaming, glowing, and blazing, or soaring 
 of different objects ; some in a literal way, others in 
 a more metaphorical sense. His general notion of 
 'day* is that of an 'unknown something that is 
 lively and joyous ; ' but its distinguishing joy — that 
 we have in seeing the light, and all the countless 
 objects that are brought into perception, or crowned 
 with fresh beauty, by it alone — he can only talk of as 
 he does of the joy of heaven, which it hath not 
 entered man's heart to conceive. His idea of night 
 is simply of gloom and melancholy, and he himself 
 joins ' night ' and ' hell ' together." " Sight ranks far 
 above all the rest of the senses in dignity ;" and not 
 only in dignity, but in power ; and through its one 
 golden channel the poet often draws his happiest 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 63 
 
 inspiration. From this spring of inspiration the 
 blind are for ever debarred. No wonder, therefore, 
 that their poetry is, on the whole, such as it is. 
 
 But if the blind boy cannot write poetry, he can 
 learn it by heart ; for his memory, when cultivated, 
 is peculiarly retentive, and in all books on Blindness 
 is spoken of as possessing far more than ordinary 
 power. "The memory of the blind," savs Guillie, 
 "is prodigious;"* and he rightly traces much of its 
 power to the habit of preciseness and order which 
 many attain when roused to the work of education. 
 He gives us, indeed, no instances of famous memories 
 from the Annals of Blind Men, but rambles off to talk 
 of Seneca, who says — speaking of himself — that he 
 could repeat two thousand detached words in the 
 same order that they held when read over to him ; 
 
 * Many instances might be cited in proof of the accuracy of a 
 blind man's memory when applied to other subjects. " When I was 
 a young man," says a director of the Great Malvern Museum, '• for 
 many years I hunted in vain to kill a common dotterel, which 
 Pennant, the great naturalist, said ought to be called 'uncommon.' 
 But at last I shot one, and sent to him. I never saw the famous 
 old man again for upwards of thirty years, and long after he had 
 become blind. Meeting him, then, by accident, ' I can hardly hope,' 
 I said, ' that you will remember me, Mr. Pennant ? ' For a moment 
 the blind man hesitated, and then cried out witli sudden eagerness, 
 • Ah! my friend of the dotterel.' " — Colquhoun, p. 233. 
 
64 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 and of a Corsican, who could master even three thou- 
 sand words, Greek, Latin, or Barbarian, sense or non- 
 sense, and repeat them either backwards or forwards 
 after once hearing them read — for which we have 
 the authority of Muretus. But, whether these be 
 Munchausenic feats, and whether the Japanese savages 
 at Yeddo have, according to Father Charlevoix, their 
 public records committed to memory by chosen blind 
 men, or not, there is no doubt that their peculiar 
 isolation gives both strength, readiness, and accuracy 
 to their memorial powers. Gossipping old Bishop 
 Burnet tells of his meeting at Schaffhausen with a 
 Miss Walkier,* who had mastered five languages and 
 knew all the Psalms and New Testament by heart ; 
 and there is no doubt that the case is a genuine one ; 
 for a large number of the pupils in St. George's 
 Fields during their six years' stay manage to learn 
 the Psalter, and there is at this time among them 
 a young man who can repeat not only the whole 
 of the hundred and fifty Prayer-Book psalms, and 
 a large number of metrical psalms and hymns, as 
 well as a considerable amount of modern poetry, 
 including Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village,' but — in- 
 credible as it may seem — the whole of Milton's 
 
 * Burnet's ' Travels,' i. p. 218. 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND "WAYS. 65 
 
 'Paradise Lost,' with marginal notes and a bio- 
 graphy! Few blind persons, and still fewer with 
 sight, could accomplish so herculean a task as 
 this, simply because few if any would set to work 
 for years with such incessant, unwearied applica- 
 tion and love for the task, as he did. Such was 
 his dexterity, and so retentive was his memory at 
 last, that he could easily learn a hundred lines of 
 Milton in little more than an hour and a half — a 
 period which barely admits of their being read aloud 
 twice, and allowing little time for getting up the 
 lesson. This, no doubt, is a case of remarkable pro- 
 ficiency; but it is more than probable that similar 
 cases are to be found in other schools, both at home 
 and in America, where the education of the blind is 
 carried on with an amazing amount of noisy vigour,* 
 
 * Vide ' Report of Pennyslvanian Blind School for 1855,' where 
 the manager complacently contrasts the American school with that 
 in St. George's Fields, " and cannot help pointing out with pride the 
 list of subjects taught in our institution, and contrasting their teach- 
 ing to read, write, and cipher, and to understand their Bible, with 
 our orthography, reading, writing, arithmetic (mental and on slates', 
 geography, maps and globe, history, United States and general, syno- 
 nymes {sic), rhetoric, natural history, philosophy, astronomy, algebra, 
 geometry, trigonometry, physiology, moral and mental philosophy, 
 geology, and biblical literature." 
 
 How many of the points in this long array are unsuited for poor 
 blind children, or beyond their reach, Mr. Dunglison does not tell us. 
 
 F 
 
66 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 if no better symptoms of real work ; and what Daniel 
 Brown has achieved may to a certain extent be done, 
 and is done, by his fellow-sufferers elsewhere. It 
 must be remembered, too, that the blind youth is 
 compelled to derive nearly all his knowledge from 
 books that are read to him (his embossed books being 
 very few in number, very expensive, and almost 
 entirely on religious subjects). While his friend 
 reads, he listens most intently ; he is now all ear — 
 not a word, not a syllable, escapes him. He cuts 
 off every channel of communication with the outer 
 world, and opens but the one inlet to the wave of 
 sound. Much depends, of course, on the fluency and 
 distinctness of his teacher, but far more on his own 
 habit of fixed and undivided attention. Here, in the 
 mere task of learning by heart, he has to listen 
 acutely and patiently to all — even to every word — 
 and this by dint of practice becomes comparatively 
 easy. When he comes to the facts and dates of His- 
 tory, he learns to sift the chaff from the wheat, and 
 burdens his memory only with the important items 
 worth retaining, content " to let the little fishes slip 
 through the meshes of the net, provided the big ones 
 be retained," acting on the witty old Fuller's advice, 
 " Make not so faithful a servant a slave. Eemember, 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 67 
 
 Atlas was weary. Have as much reason as a cameh 
 and rise when thou hast thy full load. Memory is 
 like a purse, if it be over full, that it cannot shut, all 
 will drop out." In this way he rouses, vivifies, and 
 strengthens his memory— culling a flower here, or 
 perhaps a weed there — adding gradually yet surely 
 to his store, and at last reaping the certain fruit of 
 all honest toil ; not because his powers of memory 
 are keener or stronger than those of seeing men, but 
 because he has spared neither time nor labour to put 
 them to their utmost and best exertion. He labours 
 under a host of disadvantages. No local association 
 can help him, as it does every other student; no 
 memoranda can be consulted ; not one single fact can 
 be recalled by the presence of any one person, or by 
 the sight of a place. Yet, in spite of these diffi- 
 culties, an educated blind man will acquire a know- 
 ledge of ancient and modern history, as well as of 
 modern literature; and a glance at the late Lord 
 Cranborne's 'Essays'* will show how wide and how 
 accurate that acquaintance may be. This volume 
 
 * LordOranborne, the eldest son of the Marquis of Salisbury, was 
 cut off, after a few hours' illness, in the prime of life ; a deep loss not 
 only to many attached personal friends, but specially to the blind, 
 whose interests were ever near his heart, Ob. June, 1865. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. II. 
 
 deserves notice because the author was one of the 
 few educated blind men in England who hare of late 
 years printed anything. There was, indeed, a bril- 
 liant little sketch written in 1861 by a gentleman 
 well known in Hertfordshire, entitled ' How a Blind 
 man saw The Great Exhibition ;' but the author, 
 devoting himself almost entirely to reading, and to 
 music in which he is a masterly proficient, to the 
 regret of his friends rarely uses his pen. With these 
 exceptions, there is little trace of literary work done 
 by blind men of late years, except a volume or two 
 of dreary vapid rhyme, or of querulous, discontented 
 repining at the neglect with which the authors have 
 been treated. Dr. Bull, whose work on Blindness 
 has been already quoted, was a physician in good 
 practice when he lost his sight, and therefore does 
 not fall within our list. Prescott is no exception, 
 because, although his gradually failing sight at last 
 ended in almost total blindness, he was an educated 
 man before his trouble befel him, and then nobly 
 toiled on in spite of it. Nor is Mr. Fawcett, the 
 present Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, 
 whose stores of learning, like Milton's, were mainly 
 laid up before he lost his sight in the following 
 singular manner. " On the 17th September, 1858, he 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 69 
 
 was enjoying the sport of partridge-shooting on some 
 land in the occupation of his father, when two stray 
 shots from the gun of Mr. Fawcett, sen., who was 
 with him, happened to strike his face, and, singular 
 as it may appear, the centre of each eye was pierced. 
 Instantaneous blindness followed as a matter of 
 eourse ; in fact, the eyes were completely destroyed. 
 The accident happened on a spot overlooking Salis- 
 bury Cathedral, and thus Mr. Fawcett's last glimpse 
 of the outside world embraced a view of his native 
 place. Stunned by the crushing weight of the unex- 
 pected blow, the sudden downfall of all his hopes and 
 aspirations, it is not to be wondered at that at first he 
 should have felt extremely despondent. But this 
 feeling was not destined to last long. Neither his 
 general health nor his vigour of mind had been 
 affected by the results of the accident, and before 
 many weeks had elapsed Mr. Fawcett had returned 
 to Cambridge, where he began systematically study- 
 ing political economy, and afterwards won all his 
 honours." * 
 
 There are, doubtless, other blind men of known 
 rank and education, fully entitled to take a place 
 
 Cassell's ' Portraits of Remarkable Men.' 
 
70 . BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 among those above named ; and there are, of course, 
 scattered through England a much larger number 
 well known by their friends to be possessed of like 
 attainments. These form a separate and distinct 
 body, apart by themselves, and to them our general 
 remarks do not apply. They owe their position, as 
 educated men, to special circumstances ; to the pos- 
 session of real genius and untiring perseverance,* or 
 to the appliances and resources which wealth bestows ; 
 and, above all, perhaps, in many cases to the great bless- 
 ing of a mother's fostering hand. If a right-minded 
 Englishwoman of intellect once determines that her 
 blind boy shall take his place in the world as an 
 educated gentleman, and he have within him a spark 
 of kindly genius to work on, no matter what the 
 difficulties of the task, they will be overcome, and 
 her son will grow up to reward and bless her labour. 
 Bat out of the 30,000 blind people in Great Britain, 
 a very large proportion belong to the middle and 
 lower classes, where there are indeed many mothers 
 
 * " Genius," says Helyetius, " is nothing bat undivided attention. 
 The power of applying attention steadily and undiyidedly to a single 
 object is the sure mark of a superior genius. —Window's ' Obscure 
 Diseases of the Brain,' p, 301. 
 
 And so the proverb holds good, " An ounce of genius is worth a 
 pound of clever." 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 71 
 
 of shrewd wit and loving hearts, who have all the 
 wish but none of the power to educate the blind 
 child, and where also, as statistics tell us, blindness 
 specially prevails because smallpox and fever go hand 
 in hand with impure air and scanty food ; and many 
 a little one whom disease spares, some chance blow 
 from a stick or a stone, a sudden fall, cold, exposure, 
 or neglect, dooms to life-long darkness. Some of 
 the accidental causes recorded are singular, and 
 such as no foresight could have prevented. A was 
 peeping through a key-hole, when her father thrust 
 a wire through the opening and pierced one eye, and 
 the sight of the other soon perished; B ran up 
 against another boy in the street; C fell while carry- 
 ing a basin, and the broken china cut open both 
 eyes ; D was watching a threshing-machine, when a 
 morsel of some acrid weed was blown into his eye ; 
 E was hedging, when a thorn pricked him ; F was 
 beating for game, when a bough struck him in the 
 face. The 30,000 are scattered over Great Britain 
 very unequally ; in England and Wales the ratio of 
 blind to the seeing is 1 in 1037 ; Scotland gives 1 in 
 1086; Ireland 1 in 843; the Channel Islands 1 
 in 728. Blindness is far more prevalent in rural 
 districts than in those devoted to manufacturing and 
 
72 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 mining. In Wilts, Dorset, Devon, and Corn-wall the 
 ratio is 1 in 793 ; but in the Eastern Counties 1 in 
 902 ; in Cheshire and Lancashire, 1 in 1253 ; in Bed- 
 fordshire, where the young people are chiefly busied 
 in straw-plaiting, it falls to 1 in 1325 ; while in Here- 
 fordshire, with its noble woods, rivers, mountains, and 
 valleys, it suddenly rises to 1 in 693. The Begis- 
 trar-General endeavours to account for some of these 
 differences in statistics by saying that the rural dis- 
 tricts contain a larger number of persons in advanced 
 life than in towns and manufacturing districts ; while 
 the young and healthy migrate into the manufac- 
 turing districts as apprentices, artisans, and servants. 
 This is not quite a sufficient cause for the great dif- 
 ference of ratio ; but the increased number of blind 
 people in Ireland since 1851 (though before that 
 date she had been visited by several fierce outbreaks 
 of epidemic ophthalmia) is clearly explained by 
 the fact that while the population in the ten years 
 (1851-1861) has lost 750,000, chiefly from emigration, 
 blindness, which cannot emigrate, has kept to its 
 usual proportion of victims; and the ratio is now 
 1 in 843, higher in fact than in any other part of 
 Great Britain, except the Channel Islands, where 
 coarse and scanty food, dirt, and defiance of all sani- 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 73 
 
 tary laws among the poorer classes, are bearing their 
 usual deadly fruit. During and after the potato 
 failure and the famine, ophthalmia again made its 
 appearance in Ireland, not only among the peasantry 
 in their wretched cabins, but among the masses of 
 helpless children in the Irish rags and Irish dirt of 
 crowded Irish workhouses. The disease soon grew to 
 an epidemic, and attacked even regiments of well- 
 fed, healthy, soldiers, who had been brought into the 
 pestilential air. In 1860 there were as many as 5400 
 cases of ophthalmia among these hapless children ; a 
 dreary and fatal harvest, which Dr. Wilde attributes 
 to "the crowding together of multitudes of badly- 
 fed children in ill-ventilated, unsewered, temporary 
 refuges," * to the general want of cleanliness among 
 the people, as well as their apathy and indiffer- 
 ence with regard to disease. If statistics, always 
 treacherous in matters of age, can be trusted, it seems 
 that out of the 20,000 blind persons in England, 
 about one-seventh are under twenty years of age ; t 
 
 * ' On the Number and Condition of the Blind in Ireland.' An 
 able paper read by W. R. Wilde, M.D., before the Congrk Inter- 
 national de Bienfaisance in 1862. 
 
 t The statistics of blindness in England are of the scantiest 
 kind ; in America, in spite of all the horrors of civil war, they 
 
74 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE — 
 
 Chap. II. 
 
 a large number of whom must be of the right age to 
 enter a blind school. Yet of these, only 760 are now 
 actually under instruction, and the thirteen existing 
 Schools provide accommodation only for about a thou- 
 sand pupils. The schools are scattered over England 
 in a strangely defective ratio, as a couple of examples 
 from the Census will show. In the wide-spread 
 county of York, with its population of 2,000,000, and 
 2630 blind persons (of whom at least 260 are under 
 20 years), there is but one school for 65 children ; 
 while in the South-Midland and Welsh divisions, with 
 a population of 2,600,000, and 2630 blind people, 
 there is neither school nor asylum. The list of 
 schools, as the Kegistrar gives them, is as follows : — 
 London (2), Brighton, Norwich, Exeter, Bath, Bris- 
 
 manage to be more explicit. — Report of Penmyleanian Blind School, 
 1865. 
 
 Ages. 
 
 Whites. 
 
 Free Coloured. 
 
 Slaves. 
 
 Total. 
 
 Under 10 .. 
 10 to 20 .. 
 20 ,,40 .. 
 40 ,,50 .. 
 50 ,,60 .. 
 Over 60 .. 
 
 763 
 1,494 
 2,381 
 1,202 
 1,227 
 3,644 
 
 21 
 30 
 55 
 46 
 60 
 202 
 
 Ill 
 
 124 
 250 
 172 
 154 
 699 
 
 895 
 1,648 
 2,686 
 1,420 
 1,441 
 4,545 
 
 Total .. 
 
 10,711 
 
 414 
 
 1,510 
 
 12,635 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 75 
 
 tol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool (2), Man- 
 chester, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne ; to which must be 
 added two small but nourishing schools at Plymouth 
 and Devonport, as well as the Manufactory for the 
 Blind, employing twenty-nine workers, at an average 
 of about 7s. per week. The earliest of these' was 
 founded at Liverpool, in the year 1791 ; then came 
 Edinburgh and Bristol, and next, in 1799, the School 
 for the Indigent Blind, in St. George's Fields, the 
 largest in England, and in point of education, mental/ 
 moral, and industrial, to be fairly taken as a type of 
 what can be, and ought to be, done for blind children 
 of that class. In some of the other schools a greater 
 stress seems to be laid on the industrial work, and ill 
 one or two, work in the school-room seems to be 
 almost omitted. But industrial work alone, without 
 mental instruction, will have even a worse effect on a 
 blind boy than on one with eyes. It will slowly and 
 gradually tend to degrade him to a mere working- 
 machine ; whereas, the grand object is to prevent this 
 degradation, to lessen in every possible way his isola- 
 tion, to bind him fast to the rest of the world by 
 every tie of community of feeling ; as far as may be 
 by. community of knowledge, thought, and action ; 
 and to crown the whole work with the happy truth, 
 
76 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. II. 
 
 that all are the children of one Father, to whom 
 He has given each his own toil, capacity, place, and 
 reward. No exact rule as to the precise proportion 
 of mental to industrial work, in all cases, can be laid 
 down. Much must depend on the ages of the pupils, 
 the number of teachers and of scholars, as well as the 
 variety of work. But the two occupations should act 
 and re-act on each other ; the making of a mat or a 
 basket be a relief after the horrors of Long Division, 
 or the toil of embossing ; and a chapter of English 
 History, of St. Mark, or Kobinson Crusoe, give spirit 
 to the busy craftsman at his manual work ; arid that 
 of course, in addition to the daily Chapel service in 
 which he takes a vital part, as well as to more direct 
 moral or religious' class-teaching. It would be quite 
 possible to enlarge the strictly educational part of the 
 work at the expense of the industrial ; to teach, as in 
 Pennsylvania, a smattering, or even more, of a great 
 many things never really understood, and therefore 
 of little or no real value. But this would be to lose 
 sight of the main idea with which such schools are 
 founded, viz., to enable the scholars in after life to do 
 something towards their own maintenance by manual 
 labour, to teach them to read their Bibles with under- 
 standing, and to acquire habits of diligence, truth, 
 
Chap. II. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 77 
 
 and honesty. This, of course, applies to the class of 
 blind persons who, otherwise, would probably get no 
 instruction at all but such as idle hands find — per- 
 haps behind a dog in the streets — more degrading 
 even than ignorance itself. The industrial work of 
 the girls and women in the above school consists of 
 knitting, netting, and crochet work of almost every 
 variety; the manufacture of silk purses, sash-line, 
 and window-cord, fancy hair-work of a most beautiful 
 and perfect kind, and drawing the hair for brush- 
 makers. But all these occupations are taught and 
 carried on much as with ordinary workers ; and 
 therefore need no special description. 
 
78 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. III. 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 rpHE twelve chief Blind Schools in England at 
 present will accommodate little more than 900 
 of the 2700 said to be under twenty years of age; 
 and even this limited accommodation is not always 
 put to its full test ; for on the day of the census, 
 April 8, 1861, only 760 were found to be under 
 instruction in public institutions. The precise cause 
 of this slackness in availing themselves of the chance 
 of instruction it is difficult to ascertain ; the expense 
 of getting a child into one of the schools is small, 
 and in most cases the education is free; so that 
 apathy, neglect, and poverty are probably the 
 greatest obstacles. Of those blind people above 
 twenty years old, able and willing and having need 
 to work, about 2350 are employed in general occupa- 
 tions, and chiefly among those who have sight, as 
 
Chap. III. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 79 
 
 labourers, miners, farmers (340), blacksmiths, shoe- 
 makers, tailors, &c.;* while about 700 men carry 
 
 BLIND BASKET -MAKER. 
 
 * Here and there in lonely places, no doubt, scattered through 
 England, is to be found many a blind man, steadily and happily at 
 work, though far beyond the reach of the census. Of such an one 
 
80 BLIND PEOPLE— ,Chap. III. 
 
 on with greater success the more special work of 
 blind men, as basket-makers, makers of mats, rope, 
 and sacks, brushes, and brooms. Of the women, 
 200 are employed as domestic servants; for though 
 a blind girl would hardly be a safe or efficient cook, 
 she can, as experience has shown in many of the 
 schools, be a first-rate hand at a broom, do all a 
 housemaid's work (when the geography of the house 
 is once known), make the beds, lay the dinner 
 and breakfast-table, shake the carpets, and help at 
 the washing-tub ; about 100 work as dressmakers 
 and seamstresses, a point which, incredible as it 
 may seem, is corroborated by the fact that almost 
 all the linen garments worn by the girls in 
 St. George's School are made by themselves. It 
 is corroborated, too, by Hall the Arctic Voyager, 
 who in his 'Life among the Esquimaux' tells us 
 of a poor Blind George (Paulooyer) who made all 
 his own sealskin clothes ; whose way of threading 
 
 Mr. Colquhoun tells us in his pleasant 'Sporting Days in the 
 Highlands,' " Sunning himself close to the spring, a man stone-blind 
 was making pirn-lines in the most dexterous manner I ever saw. I 
 bought a trout-line of him, and a neat ' cogue ' to water the pony 
 with from the roadside burns. He supports himself, in comfort, 
 here in this lonely Highland glen." — Colquhoun, p. 194. 
 
Chaj. III. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 81 
 
 his needle was most amusing. "He took the eye 
 of it between his teeth, bringing the needle into 
 proper position, and letting it rest on his tqngue. 
 He next brought the end of his thread towards 
 the eye of the needle, and with the tip of his 
 tongue in some way or other managed to thread 
 it. I have seen him do it scores of times." * The 
 remaining 400 get a scanty living as makers of 
 stays, knitted stockings, baskets, and brooms— doubly 
 scanty because the beggarly pittance paid as wages 
 to women with sight who work at these trades is, 
 in their case, even lessened on the false plea that 
 the work of the blind cannot be equal to that of the 
 seeing. 
 
 Thus we have a poor and industrious class of 
 about 4800 who resolutely hold themselves above 
 the degradation of begging in the streets, and in 
 spite of all obstacles do their best to keep the 
 wolf from the door. Of the stratum below these, 
 who make begging their regular profession, and 
 haunt the streets of London in every variety of 
 miserable destitution and whining imposture, the cen- 
 sus says nothing. They amount perhaps to many 
 
 * Hall's ' Esquimaux,' p. 69. 
 
82 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE — 
 
 Chap. III. 
 
 hundreds in number, and are for the most part well 
 known to each other, and to some of their fraternity 
 
 '11'. 
 
 i' 1 'iiiiii^ 
 
 BUND BEUSH-MAKtR. 
 
 in the provinces. The most skilful in their pro- 
 fession of course find the best market for their 
 talents in the great metropolis, of whom a tall, 
 
Chap. III. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 83 
 
 upright young man in rusty black clothes and 
 kid gloves is probably one of the most successful. 
 He, as many of our readers must remember, often 
 plants himself with his back firmly against the wall 
 at the foot of the National Gallery, or in some 
 other great thoroughfare, and appeals to the cease- 
 less multitude as they pass, either silently or, in plea- 
 sant, sunny weather, in a short discourse, flavoured 
 with religious phraseology of a highly unctuous 
 kind, but mainly consisting of his own reflections 
 on things in general. He wears hung round his 
 neck a small, neat, placard, informing us that he 
 has been "respectably brought up and educated, 
 but driven by dire necessity to appeal to the bowels 
 of compassion," &c. &c. &c. In fine weather he 
 probably makes his four or five shillings a day, 
 and, not keeping any canine establishment, and only 
 an occasional human guide when venturing on an 
 unknown district, can live in comparative clover. 
 "Here I stands," says one of these professionals, 
 "and often feels as if half asleep or half dreaming. 
 No one does better than I do, because I sticks 
 to it ; and it's sometimes 12 o'clock at night before 
 I leaves the streets. I feeds my dog well, but 
 only two meals a clay. I never has no amusement; 
 
 G 2 
 
84 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. III. 
 
 always out here, wet or dry, except on Sundays." 
 The lower grade of performers, far below him as 
 artists, is sufficiently represented by a few well- 
 known examples, such as the stout, elderly, good- 
 natured looking man who sits in one of the recesses 
 of Waterloo Bridge, and professes to be reading, 
 in a loud, strong voice, some page of St. Paul, 
 in Frere's system. Whether he is reading it or 
 not is entirely another question. At all events, he 
 has learned a good many pages by heart most 
 correctly; and so reads on glibly enough in all. 
 weathers, rain, east wind, or snow, when the finger 
 of an unprofessional blind boy would be utterly 
 disabled. "I make," says one blind reader of this 
 class, "about 2s. 6c?. a week in the streets. On 
 Whit-Monday I made only two pence halfpenny, 
 though I read till I was hoarse for it ; and I counted 
 about 2000 people that passed without giving me 
 a single copper." Next come such as the blind 
 fiddler who haunts the Eoyal Exchange — ■ 
 
 " Full of strange, earth-born, wiry sounds, 
 And cunning trick of bow " — 
 
 then, the youth who blows into a. tin flageolet one 
 long, crazy, attempt at a tune which he never finds ; 
 the three young, unkempt, grimy minstrels who, 
 
Chap. III. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 85 
 
 linked together arm in arm, sing alternately snatches 
 of funereal psalmody and 'Old Dog Tray' as a 
 trio;* the soldier without a hat, who invokes 
 blessings on all passers by that have eyes, and 
 especially on those who remember the defenders 
 of old England; another hatless sufferer, a big- 
 faced, tall fellow in a white smock-frock, who boldly 
 steers his way along the most crowded pavement 
 under the guidance of a sturdy bulldog;! the 
 whining outcast, near St, Giles', Endell-street, who 
 is one day silent and still as a blind and deaf 
 mute, and the next day moaning and shaking with 
 St. Vitus's dance ; and lastly, the old, red-haired, 
 freckled Scotchman, who, under the inspiration of 
 a frowsy old woman, expends himself with desperate 
 energy on a hopeless clarionet, with absolute and 
 hideous success. Nor must one ingenious performer 
 be omitted, who when his front teeth were worn 
 
 * These three were at Brighton in August, 1865, and were making 
 ahout 10s. a day. 
 
 t Grant in his ' Walk across Africa,' met with many blind people. 
 One blind man visited a certain village periodically, without a dog, 
 knowing every turn in the village, and being everywhere welcome. 
 " He used to stand in the moonlight for hours together, with crowds 
 of men and women about him, and among them the Sultan ; and all 
 joining in a chorus of devotional music,"— p. 83, 
 
86 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IIL 
 
 away by the constant friction of the mouth-piece 
 of his clarionet, contrived to make himself out of 
 one piece of bone a new set, which by dint of filing 
 and drilling a hole through them, he still manages 
 to fix in his mouth, and make do their proper 
 wbrk of mastication. 
 
 Of such as these there are probably some hundreds 
 in London dragging on a miserable existence in 
 a mixture of want, extravagance, privation, and 
 dirt. Then, far above these dreary spectacles, come 
 the blind adults belonging to the middle and upper 
 classes, among whom are 43 clergymen and ministers, 
 17 physicians and surgeons, 11 barristers and solici- 
 tors, as well as 32 officers in the army and navy; 
 all of whom have probably become blind after 
 entering on a profession ; besides 80 described as 
 teachers, many no doubt driven by necessity to 
 embrace pedagogy for a living ; and 600 musicians 
 and teachers of music. Eighty-eight old " salts " have, 
 after long years of service afloat, found a quiet 
 haven in Greenwich Hospital, and about an equal 
 number of rivals on shore are Chelsea pensioners. 
 How far the Clergy, Barristers, and Physicians are 
 still able to carry on their professional duties we 
 have no data to help. us to decide; though we are 
 
Chap. III. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 87 
 
 aware of more than one clergyman in the neighbour- 
 hood of London still most efficient in the desk and 
 pulpit. Almost all parochial work of course is out 
 of the question. 
 
 Exact Drawing of a Paper Fire-place, cut out and put together by a Blind 
 Woman, setat, 60, who lost her sight when a few weeks-old. - 
 
88 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. IV. 
 
 CHAPTER IV, 
 
 rpHE great passion, however, in the life of a Blind 
 man once roused to work is Music* Here he 
 thinks he can achieve, if not immortality, at least 
 renown and certain independence. It is to him 
 a source of the highest, purest, pleasure, a solace 
 under all his troubles, almost light in his dark- 
 ness. It rightly occupies a considerable place in 
 the School before noticed; and the surprising 
 efficiency there attained is sufficiently proved by 
 public concerts, at which sacred music, vocal and 
 instrumental, of the highest class, is performed by 
 a large blind choir, under the guidance of a 
 blind organist ; as may be seen by a glance at one 
 of their ordinary programmes. 
 
 * "It is our only enjoyment," said a blind tramper; "we all 
 likes it." 
 
Chap. IV, THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 89 
 
 programme. 
 
 SELECTION OP SACRED MUSIC, 
 
 Performed Br the Pupils on Wednesday, October 17, 1866, 
 
 With fall Choir and Organ. 
 
 Part I. 
 
 1. Organ Fugue 
 
 2. Harvest Anthem 
 
 3. Duet : ' Come ever-smiling liberty ' 
 
 4. Chorus : ' Lead On ' . . 
 
 . 5. Anthem : * Praise the Lord ' . . 
 
 6. ' "When the Storms of Life ' (Trio) . . 
 
 7. ' I will give Thanks ' (Motett) 
 
 Part II, 
 
 8. Organ Voluntary 
 
 9. TeDeumin G 
 
 1 0. Air :' Father of Heaven ' 
 
 From ' The Creation.' 
 
 11. Air and Chorus : ' The Marvellous Works ' 
 
 12. Chorus : ' Achieved is the glorious Work ' 
 
 13. Air : ' With Verdure clad ' . . 
 
 14. Chorus : ' The Heavens are telling ' 
 
 Sebastian Bach. 
 
 CaUcott. 
 
 Handel. 
 
 » 
 
 Hayes. 
 
 Sarti. 
 
 Mozart, 
 
 Mendelssohn. 
 
 Cooke. 
 
 Handel. 
 
 Haydn. 
 
 Secular Mtjsic bt the Instrumental Band op Thirty 
 Performers. 
 
 Selections from Offenbach, Meyerbeer, and Schubert. 
 
 And though many blind men never go beyond 
 a certain amount of proficiency ; yet, to guide and ac- 
 
80 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IV. 
 
 company an intelligent choir through an ordinary 
 Service and simple anthem^ or the chanting of the 
 Psalms, — they are quite able, and able to do it 
 well; and this, and even more than this, they do, 
 in turn, in their own solemn and striking Chapel 
 service. But, unfortunately for the blind musician, 
 churchwardens and trustees in want, of an organist 
 are slow to believe in his powers, no matter how 
 well attested ; and in not a few cases, though his love 
 for it still continues deep and unbroken as ever, 
 once outside the school-gates his practical acquaint- 
 ance with good music is over ; or, possibly, limited 
 to such wooden strains as can be pounded out of 
 some excruciating instrument which Mozart himself 
 could not make endurable. 
 
 Among the mural tablets of the ancient Egyptians, 
 so Kitto tells us, out of the few which exhibit 
 character, or can inspire emotion, is one from the 
 tombs of Alabastron representing a blind harper 
 sitting crosslegged on the ground, attended by seven 
 other blind men similarly seated, who sing and 
 beat time with their hands. They were clearly 
 professional musicians, full of animation and interest 
 in their work ; and expressing by every feature of 
 the face, as well as their very position, their 
 
Chap. IV. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 91 
 
 darkened lot. And what is thus recorded of Egypt 
 is more or less true of other ancient heathen nations, 
 among whom Blindness was far less prevalent. No 
 systematic provision for the blind, indeed, appears 
 to have been made; but when music became the 
 resource of the destitute, they seem to have met 
 with compassion and help. There is little doubt 
 that what music now is to them it ever has been ; 
 and if we search for a reason, the plain one starts 
 up that it swiftly and at once appeals to the 
 sense most open and ready for outward impression. 
 Whether grave or gay, merry or solemn, replete 
 with fun or tender pathos,- — it speaks intelligibly 
 and promptly to the blind man, and to answer in 
 the same language seems to him an easy task. 
 Even the difficulties of rapid execution, though in 
 reality increased, are partly hidden by his want of 
 sight ; and, if his powers of mind and body are but 
 fairly awake, he at once believes that by means of 
 music he can tell to those from whom he is so sadly 
 cut off, some at least of his joys and sorrows, 
 something of what he thinks, feels, and wishes, as 
 the rest of the world do. " Many a time the seeing 
 speak by looks, again and again by gestures which 
 the eye alone can detect,"— says an acute thinker 
 
92 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IV. 
 
 (himself blind)*— " the blind try to speak by music." 
 As a rule, all blind people fancy that they have 
 the gift of music, and need only make the attempt 
 to become good players at once. In every Blind 
 School nine-tenths of the pupils believe this, and 
 of those who get their living in the streets ninety 
 out of a hundred are musicians in some shape or 
 other. These street performances, as the reader 
 knows, comprise almost every known shade of 
 melancholy sound, as well as here and there a 
 gleam of melody and success. As far as a certain 
 amount of manual dexterity goes — the accurate 
 measure and rhythm, the precise progression of the 
 parts of a fugue, or of bass, tenor, alto, and treble, 
 all may be fairly observed; but when one looks 
 for that exquisite finish and delicacy of expression 
 which all music demands, that subtle weaving 
 together of light and shade, which make up the 
 cloudy - passion or glorious light of Beethoven, the 
 solemn grandeur or tenderness of Handel, the stormy 
 joy and rush of the * Elijah,' or the endless fairy grace 
 of Mozart, — in a word, that inner soul of music 
 without which it is but barren sound, — there, too 
 often, the blind man fails, and there he is least 
 conscious of his failure. This may spring from his 
 
Chap. IV. THEIR WOBKS AND WATS. 93 
 
 having been taught badly; too much by rote and 
 rule; or even too much by ear, and thus having 
 been in some degree led to imagine that in catching 
 hold of the mere sound of a phrase, or a succession 
 of phrases, he is getting hold of the music. But 
 arise how it may, the evil is undoubted, and varieB 
 only in degree. The want of this higher sense is to 
 melody what the loss of perfume would be to flowers, 
 of colour to the glory of sunset, almost of light to 
 the world itself. Whether the blow that snatches 
 from the blind man his share in the glory and 
 grace of light, does not too often impair or destroy 
 that diviner inner sense which discerns the full 
 perfection of odour, of colour, and melody, the frag- 
 rant breath of morning, the inborn rhythm of all true 
 verse, or the avripbOfLov yeXacr/ia of the wide-spread 
 sea, is a problem difficult to solve. But there can 
 be no possible doubt that, however well old Homer's 
 words — 
 
 Thy irtpi Mova' i<pl\ri<rev, 8£5oi/5' ayaBovre KaKoi te, 
 J 0(pSa\fiwv pev &/j.ep<re t 5£5oii5' Tjtieiav aoiS^jv .... 
 
 may have fitted Demodocus, or the "Bard of Troy 
 divine " himself, they are not the general heritage of 
 blind musicians or poets. Every now and then, in the 
 musical world, there rises for a moment to the surface 
 
94 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IV. 
 
 some strange prodigy like Blind Tom, whose public 
 concerts at St. James's Hall in 1866 attracted con- 
 siderable attention ; and so peculiar, indeed, was his 
 case, and so unlike that of other blind musicians, 
 that we pause to notice a few points in his history. 
 He was the son of a negro slave, born in South 
 Georgia in the year 1850 ; and brought up among 
 other slave children. He was, too, a thorough 
 "nigger," jet black, with thick blubber lips, protruding 
 heels, and woolly hair. Up to seven years old, 
 he was counted and treated as an idiot; when, 
 suddenly, one night he was overheard playing the 
 piano in his master's drawing-room ; touching it 
 with singular grace and beauty, wandering through 
 rapid cadences, and wild bursts of melody, as a 
 finished musician. As far as could be known, he had 
 never even touched a piano till that night. But 
 from that time forth, he was a prodigy among the 
 planters' wives and daughters, and had free access 
 to the piano, on which he every day did greater 
 wonders ; repeating without effort almost note by 
 note any music once played to him, and with 
 wonderful accuracy, mimicking any fault or pecu- 
 liarity in the style of the performer. But, fondest of 
 all was he of wandering away into some sad minor 
 
Chap. IV. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 95 
 
 key, full of passion, sorrow, or pain that seemed 
 striving for utterance, and yet was full of mystery 
 to those who listened. His marvellous powers were 
 soon exhibited to the American public; and then 
 created as much astonishment as they have since done 
 in London. After once hearing them, he would sit 
 down and play, with amazing correctness, difficult 
 pieces of music, a dozen pages in length ; and placed 
 at the piano with another performer he (like Mozart 
 at nine years old) played a perfect bass accompani- 
 ment even to the treble of music heard for the first 
 time. After any prolonged musical effort, says his 
 American biographer, his whole bodily frame seems 
 to give way, and exhaustion follows, accompanied 
 by epileptic spasms. He sits full half a yard from 
 the piano, with outstretched arms, clutching at the 
 keys at first " like an ape clutching food," and now 
 and then bursting out into an idiotic laugh. Then 
 the head falls back, the hands begin to work, and 
 wild strains of harmony float over the room, such 
 as have rarely fallen on the ear before, or, in rapid 
 succession, passages from Weber, Beethoven, and 
 Mozart, all full of such intense passion that the 
 whole audience are snatched into a wild uproar of 
 applause, which the poor idiotic musician is himself 
 
96 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IV. 
 
 the first to begin, and to end with a loud ringing 
 laugh of" Yha, Yha!" in true negro fashion. Then, 
 when all is over, a weary look of despair settles down 
 on the distorted face, a tired sigh steals from the 
 restless lips, — and the last spark of music seems 
 to have faded out into hopeless, dead, vacancy. 
 
 But cases of this kind are altogether exceptional, 
 and afford no safe ground for precedent, or indeed 
 for argument of any kind. Tom's case is marked 
 by so many strangely odd and contradictory features 
 as almost to defy criticism, or the formation of 
 anything like a clear judgment. He professed to 
 have a wonderfully keen and sensitive ear ; and he 
 really had great dexterity in repeating with a parrot- 
 like correctness phrases, or even long passages, of 
 music only once heard ; but on the other hand 
 one of his favourite feats was to produce an out- 
 rageous, discordant, jumble of sound which no ear 
 of the slightest pretence to sensibility could produce 
 or endure without intense pain and disgust ; playing, 
 it is said, an air in one key with the right hand, an 
 accompaniment in another hey, while he sang the air in 
 a third! Any such case as his therefore must 
 stand alone, as a positive anomaly ; if not as a mon- 
 strosity best fitted for Barnum's musical museum. 
 
Chap. IV. THEIR WORKS AHD WATS. 97 
 
 If we turn to the music of the streets, we descend 
 at once to a lower grade than this ; to performances 
 which Mr. Mayhew roughly divides into " the toler- 
 able and the intolerable," the latter variety, we 
 fear, being by far the most prevalent. By these 
 performers music is employed not as a means of 
 giving pleasure, but of rousing compassion. Take, 
 for example, the case of old Blind Sarah,* whom 
 many of my readers must have seen about the 
 streets of London, and once having heard could 
 never forget. She had been upon the streets of 
 London for forty years, having been born 1786, and 
 cast adrift by the Workhouse at the age of twenty. 
 Her instrument was the hurdy-gurdy, — the "Cymbal" 
 she insisted on calling it, which it took her five 
 months to learn. During her forty years of wandering 
 she had had four guides, and had worn out three 
 instruments. It took her about three weeks to learn 
 a new tune on the hurdy-gurdy ; and her complete 
 stock which, even at last, rarely exceeded a dozen, 
 included 'Moll Brook,' 'Harlequin Hamlet,' and the 
 'New-rigged Ship,' old-fashioned ditties strangely 
 
 * A good, though flattering, likeness of Sarah and her guide is 
 now to he seen at the Water Colour Exhibition in Pall Mall (Dec. 
 8, 1866). 
 
 H 
 
98 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IV. 
 
 out of place in these days, when such trash as ' Slap- 
 Bang ' is omnipotent in the streets. A more squalid, 
 bedraggled old creature than this wretched, little, 
 grimy old woman it would be hard to imagine, 
 unless one pitched upon the guide who led her about 
 on her daily round of importunity. Nothing could 
 be more forlornly hideous than the noise she 
 managed to extract from the "cymbals;" yet she 
 contrived to rouse the pity of passers-by by her 
 destitute appearance, if not by the beauty of her 
 music, of which she loved to say, " King David used 
 to play on one of these here instruments, which it 
 isn't hard to play ; the only thing is to hip the works 
 covered, up, or the half-pence is apt to drop in?' From 
 the days of Shimei down to Colenso the sweet singer 
 of Israel has suffered many indignities, but this 
 crowning accusation of playing the " hurdy-gurdy " 
 it would be hard to exceed; though unconsciously 
 offered by a poor wandering outcast, who merely 
 meant to dignify her own office. She kept to her 
 vagrant life in the streets to the very last, and 
 managed to make a living for herself and guide, 
 until one luckless day, in crossing Seymour Street, 
 the two old women were knocked down by a 
 random cab, the guide being picked up dead, and 
 
Chap. IV. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 99 
 
 Blind Sarah so injured as to rally but for a few 
 months. 
 
 Here and there, among these wandering minstrels, 
 may be found some one performer of higher grade 
 and taste than Sarah; but this is the exception to 
 the rule, if only for the one unhappy reason that any- 
 thing like even moderate taste, or skill, in playing 
 or singing — especially in a man — finds better em- 
 ployment and higher pay in the taproom or concert- 
 room of the public-house. 
 
 But however sad all this music of the streets, as 
 has been proved on a previous page, a far higher 
 grade of music is now to be found in all the better 
 Blind Schools of Europe, as at Paris, Vienna, London, 
 and Zurich, at which latter place Mendelssohn, with 
 his usual kindliness, once won the hearts of all the 
 blind inmates. He was there in the hot summer of 
 1842, to rest and recruit his overtaxed brain; and 
 though besieged by a crowd of eager musicians 
 and amateurs, would accept of no invitation. But 
 hearing that the pupils of the Blind School were 
 most anxious, as they said, to see him, in their favour 
 he made an exception. He spoke to the sightless 
 assembly in kindest words, he listened to their songs 
 and choruses, and, score in hand, to some even of 
 
 H 2 
 
100 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. IV. 
 
 their own compositions, showing clearly his interest 
 and pleasure. Seeing a correction in the score, and 
 finding it to be the blind musician's own work, " It is 
 right," he kindly said, " and makes the passage more 
 correct, but it was better and more striking before ; 
 take care that your corrections are improvements, 
 — a cultivated ear wants no rules, but is its own rule 
 and measure." And then the great musician asked 
 permission to sit down at their piano, and wandered 
 away into one of those wild and tender strains of 
 speaking melody for which he was so famous. His 
 silent, wrapt, audience listened so intently to ' The 
 Song without Words,' that a pinfall would have broken 
 the stillness. One by one over the eager faces crept 
 the air of deep, quiet joy, until in the midst of the 
 great flood of mingling harmonies, a voice came to 
 them out of the very chorus they had just been singing. 
 Then their enthusiasm knew no bounds. The great 
 master had carried them away, at his will, to heights 
 of joy and triumphant praise before unknown; he 
 had whispered to them of sorrow, and the cloudy 
 ways of life, in words of soft, unbroken tenderness; 
 and now he stirred their inmost depths by a strain of 
 their own weaving, into which he poured a new tide 
 of living song, new grace, and new meaning. No words 
 
Chap. IV. THEIE WORKS AND WAYS. 101 
 
 could tell what they felt ; they could have pressed 
 him to their very hearts for joy. This was not long 
 before the great musician's death ; but he still lives 
 in the Blind School at Zurich, and there still remains 
 as a precious relic the master's chair, in which he sat. 
 Of course, where real musical genius, intellect, 
 and education are combined, the Blind musician may 
 at once take high rank. And many who know the 
 county of Herts well have heard of one such musi- 
 cian, whose masterly hand on the organ and piano is 
 even better known than his amusing pen. Give him 
 but a single theme, such as " Twilight," " A Cradle 
 Song," or " The Sea," and he will swiftly carry away 
 all who listen, to quiet, lonely hill-sides, and cloudy 
 valleys ; to the peace of fading, dusky skies, or 
 rippling waters under the first light of stars ; through 
 the calm of repose, the joy of returning light ; along 
 the margin of the broad sea, as its treacherous waves 
 cream over smooth sand, or dash in wild stormy 
 billows on the rocky shore. If the post brings him 
 news of a friend's marriage, or the birth of a first- 
 born, he flies to tell the good news to the piano, and 
 there crowns the marriage-feast or the font with 
 garlands of bright flowers, that fill the lonely old 
 Manor-house with an echo of new joy. 
 
102 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. IV, 
 
 Genius like this, of course, is rare — more rare, 
 perhaps, and more cherished along the ways of 
 darkened life than in the fuller glare of day; but 
 when found, then to the blind man in his darkness 
 
 " The dainty Muse rolls Back the silver gate 
 Of melody ; and strange immortal harmonies 
 Come floating from the depths beyond, 
 To snatch the. ravished ear aloft 
 On wings of joy.'' 
 
 Such a musician as this, as it has been well said 
 of Schubert, enters ou music as a prince on his own 
 dominions. What others toil for he wins. Melody 
 flows from him like perfume from the rose ; harmony 
 is the atmosphere he breathes. If a master wishes 
 to teach him anything, ten to one he knows it 
 already, by some hidden keen instinct, which is to 
 him in the place of written law, rule, and even 
 learning itself* Men of genius have a right to 
 overlook the law, and for a simple reason, it is they 
 who often make law, and bring it to perfection. 
 If they invent a departure from a rule, that departure 
 may become a new rule. But to do this, Genius is 
 indispensable.f To which it may be added that a 
 
 * H. K. Hawes, in an able sketch of Schubert and Chopin, 
 t ' Life of Handel,' by Sehcelcher. 
 
Chap. IV. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 103 
 
 breaker of the law is a far commoner bird than a 
 genius. 
 
 Many attempts have been made to invent a system 
 of Musical Notation, which might be printed in raised 
 type, and so be perceptible to the touch of the blind- 
 musician. But, though some of these systems are 
 ingenious enough, and bars of a simple melody may 
 actually be deciphered by the finger of a blind man, 
 yet, the whole process of reading is so slow ; and 
 embossing itself is so enormously bulky, and so 
 expensive, that none of them have ever been of any 
 practical use. As ingenious and amusing puzzles 
 they may deserve high praise ; but that they can 
 ever become of any real, practical value to the 
 blind, is a question to be much doubted. Four of 
 these Systems are founded on the adoption of arbitrary 
 signs, or letters, for the notes, and for most of the 
 attendant marks or words of musical expression ; and 
 some idea of their various principles may be formed 
 by glancing at the two next pages, where, below a 
 single line of music printed in the ordinary type, will 
 be found the same passage represented according to 
 the systems of Eousseau, M. Braille, and M. Guadet; 
 while the first few bars of the Old Hundredth 
 Psalm will illustrate the American system invented 
 by a blind man named Mahoney. 
 
104 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE — 
 
 Chap. IV. 
 
 Sfcl 
 
 LE GRAND EOI DAGOBERT. 
 
 — N- 
 
 m 
 
 s 
 
 £ 
 
 IS^ 
 
 This passage, expressed ia Rousseau's ' System of 
 Musical Notation,' would run thus : — 
 
 (S)(d)|3c 
 
 c b b a 
 
 ■ b. 
 
 c d c b a b 
 
 The same in Braille's system of dots : — 
 
 a • s e • 
 
 The same in Guadet's system — 
 
 a, 6 
 
 8 
 
 3o 6 i i e e. l. ouoiei 
 
 All these three systems are open to the objection 
 of being very elaborate and complicated j of affording 
 little or no means for indicating musical expression ; 
 of being very hard to decipher quickly and ac- 
 curately ; offering great facility for mistakes ; and 
 being at the same time very bulky and extremely 
 costly ; while, after all, the keenest of blind readers 
 only makes out after great labour the one hard line 
 of single treble notes, which his music-master could 
 dictate to him in less than a minute, with little 
 trouble, and without expense. 
 
Chap. IV. THEIE WORKS AND WATS. 105 
 
 According to Mahoney's system the first four bars 
 of " The Old Hundredth," would run thus :— * 
 
 (Tr.mM- f 
 
 - f l 
 
 A I A G 1 I A GBl 
 
 CE I CE BEl A-CF GCEl CE. E 
 
 J ...«....<«.. 
 
 • 
 
 a r 
 
 $ A 
 
 A I A E I F CIA El 
 
 " His object," he says, " is to simplify the method 
 of printing music in raised characters for the blind, 
 by substituting the letters by which the notes are 
 known for the notes themselves; the value of each 
 note being designated by affixing to the letter the 
 usual signs of crotchet, quaver, semiquaver, &c, and 
 thus compressing the music into a smaller space. 
 
 But, however ingenious Mr. Mahoney's plan may 
 appear to the eye of the sighted reader, and simple 
 when compared with that of Braille, the process of 
 deciphering a piece of embossed music, in this or any 
 other system, must be a very long, tedious operation, 
 to which the musician cannot have recourse while 
 
 * This Notation is hardly intelligible, and certainly seems incor- 
 rect ; but it is printed accurately from the only embossed copy that 
 can be found. 
 
105 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. IV. 
 
 playing ; and offering a very doubtful assistance in 
 attempting to learn a new piece. As far as we 
 are aware, no embossed system for teaching music 
 has been introduced into any of the English Blind 
 Schools, and {he decision seems to be a wise one. 
 New music is taught to the pupil, mainly, by dicta- 
 tion ; he having acquired a knowledge of the ordinary 
 rudiments, as to notes, scales, keys, and fingering in 
 the ordinary way. A passage, or phrase, having 
 been dictated, is then sung, or played, either with 
 single notes, or full chords, as the case may require ; 
 and this the pupil repeats vocally, or on the instru- 
 ment, until he has mastered it ; dealing with each 
 note, phrase, or passage, as a beginner at reading 
 would with ordinary letters, syllables, words, phrases, 
 and sentences. In this way an air, or a longer piece 
 of music, is gradually but accurately learned ; and 
 having thus been once printed on the blind boy's 
 memory, is soon stereotyped for future use. Once 
 stereotyped, it is rarely forgotten or lost. After 
 four or five years' steady instruction of this kind, a 
 blind youth has been known to master in a few months 
 all the tunes in ' Hymns, Ancient and Modern,' so as 
 to be able to become a candidate for the situation of 
 organist at a large country Parish Church where this 
 
Chap, IV. THEIE WORKS AND WAYS. 107 
 
 book was used. It is pleasant to add that he ob- 
 tained the appointment, still retains it, and discharges 
 its duties to the entire satisfaction of the parishioners. 
 Some little music, and a Book of Instructions, 
 have also been embossed in the ordinary type, but 
 the process is far too expensive, and the operation 
 of deciphering it far too uncertain and too tedious 
 ever to admit of its being used in any but rare and 
 exceptional cases. 
 
 The Instrumental Band at the Blind School, at Paris, consists of 3G 
 
 
 Performers. 
 
 
 12 Violins. 
 
 1 Hautboy. 
 
 3 Drums. 
 
 5 Violoncellos. 
 
 2 Clarionets, 
 
 1 Triangle. 
 
 2 Contra Bassi. 
 
 5 Brass Instruments. 
 
 
 3 Flutes. 
 
 2 Bassoons. 
 
 
 At Barcelona, of 23 Performers. 
 
 10 Violins. 2 Clarionets. 1 Trumpet. 
 
 2 Contra Bassi. 2 Cornets. 1 Drum. 
 
 2 Horns. 3 Flutes. 
 
 At the Blind School, St. George 's-fields, of 37 Performers. 
 
 20 Violins. 2 Clarionets. 1 Double Bass. 
 
 2 Tenors. 3 Flutes. 1 Drum. 
 
 6 Brass Instruments. 1 Violoncello. 1 Triangle. 
 
108 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. V. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 TTTE come now to the different rival systems of 
 Embossed Printing which have unhappily 
 been invented for the use, we had almost said dis- 
 traction, of blind people. So fierce and so bitter 
 has been the war waged over this knotty problem, 
 and so eager have the partisans of each new invention 
 been to claim for themselves the discovery of the 
 one, sole, best method, that the blind man's library 
 now consists of a very few volumes, only to be had at 
 a price which puts them almost entirely beyond the 
 reach of the class who most need them. The four 
 systems* that need notice here, are those of Frere, 
 
 * There is no need to mention the minor systems which have 
 from time to time been found out hy private friends of the blind — at 
 least ten or a dozen in number. The last new one is the invention 
 of B. Mitford, Esq., of Cheltenham. It is in the Eoman letter, and 
 has no peculiarity whatever but that of forcing blind people to read 
 
Chap. V. 
 
 THEIE WORKS AND "WAYS. 
 
 109 
 
 Lucas, Moon, and Alston ; each claiming to be the 
 one infallible method of reading for the, Blind. Mr. 
 Frere's system is, he tells us, based entirely on 
 the phonetic principle, or combination of elementary 
 sounds, and is conveyed to the touch of tbe blind 
 reader by a series of stenographic signs or symbols. 
 Thus instead of the four letters, T, N, D, K, he sub- 
 stitutes four lines, J , — , \, /, respectively named 
 Teh, Un, Deh, Ur; while F, G-, J, and B, are meta- 
 morphosed into Geh P, 1 Uf, J Jeh, and \j Beh; 
 and so on through the rest of the alphabet, in a series 
 of sounds, "guttural," "hissing," and "gushing," 
 with hard and soft breathing, and aspirations. All 
 this, be it remembered, is to teach a poor, ignorant, 
 blind child the names and meaning of letters which 
 are supposed to be too hard for him in their ordinary 
 shapes and names. He is accordingly introduced to 
 angles ^, crooks ^ , crescents ^, dots , " . (which 
 
 in perpendicular columns of words, from the top to the bottom of the 
 page, instead of from left to right as the rest of the world do. The 
 alphabet thus presents itself : — 
 
 D 
 
 A 
 
 F 
 
 P 
 
 E 
 
 B 
 
 G 
 
 
 
 B 
 
 C 
 
 H 
 
 E 
 
 L 
 
 D 
 
 I 
 
 T 
 
 I 
 
 E 
 
 J, &c. 
 
 H 
 
 N 
 
110 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. V. 
 
 latter stand for vowels); dots final, dots upper, 
 middle, and lower, upwards, downwards ; angles, with 
 points forwards or backwards ; to straight lines down- 
 wards or sideways; long vowels, and short vowels; 
 in all, 29 signs ; each accompanied by a rule in prose, 
 or still drearier verse, of some three or four lines, 
 to be learned by heart by the hapless disciple, to 
 whom ABC is a mystery. All that can be said 
 of this method is that it is a very ingenious and 
 elaborate system of shorthand, very difficult — we 
 speak from positive experience — to be understood by 
 a person with eyes, and hopelessly bewildering to 
 any one without them. It is said that many blind 
 people have learned to read by Frere, and truly, 
 no doubt ; for time, money, skill, and love hare been 
 expended on its behalf with lavish generosity. Armed 
 with the same weapons, we would undertake to teach 
 half-a-dozen such scholars Polish or Scandinavian. 
 
 Next comes Lucas's system, still more arbitrary 
 in character, and more purely stenographic* than 
 
 * In inventing systems for the Blind, the interests of the majority, 
 not of the minority, should be consulted. No one dreams of inventing 
 a new system of geometry because a few find it difficult to get over the 
 ' Ass's Bridge ; ' yet new Alphabets are continually being contrived 
 for the Blind, because a few have a difficulty in reading by the one 
 in common use/' 
 
Chap. V, THEIR WORKS AND WATS. Ill 
 
 Frere's. Yet, in spite of its being a short-hand sys- 
 tem, says the Eev. W. Taylor (one of the highest 
 authorities on all subjects connected with the Blind), 
 " Lucas's New Testament occupies two thousand eight 
 hundred square inches of page more than Alston's (the 
 Eoman letter) notwithstanding its abbreviations and 
 contractions." Instead of a simple character for each 
 of the elementary sounds of the English language it 
 gives an alphabet redundant in eight characters, and 
 deficient in ten ; making no distinction between long 
 vowels and short ones. F appears in four different 
 disguises as f, ff, ph, and gh ; final ees are abolished, 
 and we meet with such strange monsters as fac, 
 accural, eensur, and tim, for time, censure, face, and 
 accurate ; we find people " laffing " without noing it, 
 at being cawt, and not all to giv a reson; "because 
 when the sound of a word is different from the 
 spelling, the spelling is altered ; until at last, in utter 
 bewilderment with the long list of contractions and 
 omissions, we are at a loss to know whether our 
 respectable old friend Q stands for Queen, Quaker, or 
 Question ; or why H should not stand for horrible, as 
 well as P for puzzle, instead of for " have," " hither," 
 "he;" "put," "patience," or "upon," according to 
 Eule in "Table 1, for learners." A single line in the 
 
112 • BLIND PEOPLE — Chai>. V. 
 
 Lucasian dialect will probably explain its full beauty 
 more clearly than any description. 
 
 1 . Pure Lucas. 
 
 lvl 3fV i- > 1 I \ ■) )-rc > ■ O 
 
 2. Translated into Letters. 
 
 If. t. bl. bi. lis. p. h. wh. v. b. pzld. u. t. ed. 
 
 3. Translated into Words. 
 
 If the blind Boy has patience he will verily be puzzled uuto the end. 
 
 4. Various readings * 
 
 house upon have with unity the 
 
 If two blind Boy his put hither which vanity be puzzled you' to end. 
 
 9th 
 
 So much for short, simple, and common words, as 
 in the above example ; but if the learner meet with 
 any longer ones, he is more mystified than ever. Nos 
 stands for nevertheless, kd for kingdom, instead of kid; 
 nsg for notwithstanding, pr for prayer, while fr stands 
 for friend, and thf not for thief, but therefore; tables 
 becomes tabs, and overtake, otak; while elasti jvrnss 
 stands for everlasting weariness. Our readers will be 
 able to judge from this how far such an elaborate, 
 complicated, and purely arbitrary system is likely to 
 
 * " Various Headings ; '' because most of these signs have two or 
 more distinct meanings ; lis = his, has, house; u= unity, you, and 
 unto, &c. &c. 
 
Chap. V. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 113 
 
 help the blind boy over the miseries of the Alphabet 
 and the Spelling Book. 
 
 The third of the arbitrary systems is the invention 
 of Mr. Moon, who deserves infinite praise, as a blind 
 man, for his labours on behalf of himself and his 
 fellow-sufferers; though it is to be wished that he 
 had never meddled with the alphabet but to print it 
 in the old Eoman letter. He claims to have avoided 
 " the complicated form of the Roman letter, and 
 the still less discernible angular type," by a revised 
 alphabet, each letter of which is formed of one line, 
 or at the most of two, having a partial resemblance to 
 those in common use, and allowing only of five con- 
 tractions, ment, ing, tion, ness, and and, each of which 
 is represented by its final letter. A dozen letters of 
 this alphabet will show how far intricacies have been 
 avoided, or likeness to the ordinary letter has been 
 kept up. 
 
 o r noijo>J Z $*J ^ c — s 
 
 D. E. F. G. H. I. J. W. X. Y. Z. &c. N. B. P. Q. 
 
 We must agree with him that the resemblance he 
 speaks of is partial enough, but we are at a loss to 
 discover in what way our respected old friends Z, and 
 K, N, U, and J are more complicated than the half- 
 
 i 
 
114 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. V. 
 
 barbarous looking symbols Z - S / <• / "^ / ^, J - 
 One lunar line will suffice to show the aspect of the 
 whole system to the eye of the seeing, and to the 
 finger of the blind boy : — 
 
 a man's own geese 
 
 a nAA// on/v irrvr 
 
 TO HIM AEE ALL SWANS. 
 
 _ o on A\r /nll /n/w/ 
 
 Whatever claims these arbitrary systems may have 
 on the blind boy's notice, one fatal defect runs 
 through them all, viz., that they tend to cut him off 
 more than ever from the rest of the world, and espe- 
 cially from those who are able to read, and to help 
 him when he comes to a hard word. The task of learn- 
 ing Moon, Frere, or Lucas, is to him like learning a 
 new language ; with this difference, that when he has 
 learned it, and hard work in the course of years has 
 deadened his sense of touch, not a single friend or 
 companion at home will understand it, or be able to 
 read with the eye the mysterious symbols which the 
 reading-finger can no longer discern. Twenty years 
 ago, shrewd old Abbe* Carton spoke to this very point : 
 " En effet," he says, " si un caractere, connu des clair- 
 voyants, est employe dans l'impression en relief pour 
 
Chap. V. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 115 
 
 les aveugles, ces infortunes sont plus rapproches des 
 autres hommes que s'ils se servaient d'un caractere 
 
 inconnu de ceux qui les entourent Diminuer 
 
 la difficult^ qu'auraient les clairvoyants a connaitre 
 l'alpliabet des aveugles, est reellement travailler en 
 faveur des aveugles. Le plus grand malheur des 
 aveugles est leur isolement." Common sense ought 
 long ago to have stepped in and settled this question, 
 but she has had the door shut in her face by pre- 
 judice ; and the strife still goes on. Meanwhile the 
 old Roman letter, in spite of all patent inventions, 
 manages to hold her own; to print books far less 
 expensive and less bulky than Moon's, and, if the 
 testimony of a large number of blind children is to 
 be believed, quite as easily read ; the New Testament 
 in Alston costing 21., that in Moon's type 41. 10s. 
 The use of the Eoman letter helps the blind boy to 
 read as all the rest of the world reads ; to spell and 
 to write as they do. The other three systems abso- 
 lutely prevent his doing so, and inflict upon him 
 the intolerable hardship of learning a semibarbarous 
 jangle which no one with eyes can understand, and 
 which he himself is unable to express in writing. 
 Sooner or later (the sooner the better) some one sys- 
 tem of embossed printing will be generally adopted, 
 
 i 2 
 
116 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE — 
 
 Chap. V. 
 
 and it must embrace at least the following features : — 
 1. It must resemble as nearly as possible the type in 
 
 LL1SD GULL READING. 
 
 use among seeing men ; that the blind scholar, in 
 learning to read, may have every possible help from 
 his remembrance of letters he may once have seen, 
 
Chap. V. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 117 
 
 but which now his fingers must feel for him, or from 
 any one who can read an ordinary book ; or, if need 
 be, that a friend may read to him. 2. The words 
 must be correctly spelt in full ; that when he learns to 
 write, others may read his written words. And 3. All 
 must agree on a clear, sharp type which the finger 
 of the adult, hardened by rough work, and the keen 
 touch of the child, may be alike able to discern. It 
 is to be hoped that science, which has done so much 
 for all other readers, will in due time provide for the 
 dwellers in the land of darkness a literature and a 
 typography which will help to make them wiser, 
 better, and happier. Many earnest men are working 
 in this good cause. It is to be hoped that, as "pax 
 paritur bello," differences will some day be laid aside, 
 and the work crowned with that strength and suc- 
 cess which unity of action as well as purpose alone 
 can give. 
 
118 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VI. 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 Should Blind Children be Educated with those who have Sight, 
 or not? 
 
 npHE question at the head of this chapter may, at 
 first sight, seem as easily answered as asked. 
 Yet many considerations have to be weighed before 
 any answer can be returned to it ; and even then the 
 reply will be neither so definite nor so clear as might 
 be wished. 
 
 First, as regards Schools where large numbers of 
 blind children are being educated, the experiment of 
 mingling them with pupils who have sight has never 
 been fully tried. In one or two of the minor English 
 schools, indeed, where the number of pupils is so 
 small as to permit all the teaching to be individual, 
 a few blind children have been associated with deaf 
 mutes ; but with no marked result or advantage to 
 either party. Again, in Donaldson's famous and 
 
Chap. VI. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 119 
 
 admirable Asylum near Edinburgh, a somewhat similar 
 experiment has been tried, by mingling with the 
 deaf and dumb orphans some few who have speech 
 and hearing ; at some few times for instruction in the 
 school-room, and always for out-door work and re- 
 creation. And the experiment has so far succeeded, 
 because very much that the deaf-mute learns of 
 industrial work and manual exercise, he learns in a 
 great measure by imitation. In all that concerns the 
 eye — that mighty engine in all education — he is 
 quite on a level with those about him ; he learns to 
 dig in the garden, to plane a deal board, to drive in 
 a nail, or to mend a torn jacket, almost as well 
 as if he could hear all that his fellow-workers were 
 saying. 
 
 But with the blind boy among those who can see, 
 the whole question is changed so far as industrial 
 work, manual labour, and recreation are concerned. 
 In no one of these things is he on a par with his 
 companions ; imitation will rarely, if ever, help him 
 to turn round the wheel a single inch. In some few 
 easy sports and games, indeed, he may at last learn 
 to take a small part, especially if his companions are 
 few in number ; but this recreation is not always satis- 
 factory, and sometimes not safe. I have often seen 
 
120 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. VI. 
 
 a dozen blind boys playing French and English, or 
 even leap-frog, with great spirit, daring, and enjoy- 
 ment ; but in the one case half the fun was because 
 all were precisely in one like condition, and in the 
 other the ease and safety with which the game went 
 on would have been greatly lessened if some of the 
 merry frogs had been able to see their companions. 
 
 If out of twenty young basket-makers ten had sight 
 and ten had not, the blind workers could derive little 
 or no help in learning the trade from working with 
 sighted companions ; and in some points of detail the 
 teacher would have to deal very differently with his 
 scholars ; while in other matters of rule and manage- 
 ment each section would have a distinct treatment of 
 its own. The presence of the sighted with the blind 
 would, it has been thought, tend to brighten and freshen 
 up the blind workers, and help to give life and anima- 
 tion to their work ; and for a time it might be so. 
 But by degrees the novelty to either party would wear 
 off, and insensibly, but inevitably, the two sections 
 of light and darkness, mixed but not blended, would 
 move on towards separation, and each of the workers 
 would fraternize with the members of his own king- 
 dom. More and more, I fancy, this tendency to 
 separation would increase ; and thus the very object 
 
Chap. VI. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 121 
 
 for which the two classes were mingled would be 
 frustrated. 
 
 The boys with sight would by degrees learn their 
 advantages over their less fortunate companions, 
 claim and exercise a sort of superiority over, and dif- 
 ference from, them ; and thence would follow further 
 distinction and wider separation. It may be that the 
 experiment has never been fully and fairly tried on a 
 large scale, and for obvious reasons it is not likely to 
 be tried ; but the above results are those to which 
 common sense points as most natural and most pro- 
 bable. The experiment is not likely to be tried, 
 because it will scarcely happen that any such School 
 will be founded equally for the reception of the Sighted 
 as well as the Blind ; while the charter of no existing 
 school will admit of its being done at present. 
 
 Whether a blind boy might not under certain cir- 
 cumstances be sent with advantage to a school where 
 all his companions have sight, is another and different 
 question, to which there is a clearer and easier answer. 
 All here must depend on the character of the school, 
 and, above all, of the master ; of course entirely omit- 
 ting from the calculation all such cases as those of 
 Saunderson and Huber. Genius of that cast will 
 make its way, whether at school or under home- 
 
122 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VI. 
 
 teaching. Whatever the river of difficulty be, genius, 
 if there be no bridge, will build one, or find a ford. 
 But for a boy of ordinary ability, while young, there 
 can be no doubt that in a good school, under a good 
 master, very much may be done among scholars of 
 his own age who have sight. He can read, cipher, 
 and even write from dictation, with his class ; it may 
 be more slowly, but not less correctly, than his com- 
 panions ; while, in all that they are taught orally, he 
 at least can take a good share. If he has brains, and 
 is fairly cared for at home, his religious instruction 
 may be almost identical with theirs. The grand 
 thing is in every way to lessen his sense of isolation, 
 to show him that he is not meant to be cut off from 
 the rest of the world, but as far as possible to feel, to 
 think, and to act, as others do. He must learn to be 
 guided by the same principles, the same laws of right 
 and wrong, the same responsibility, the same rules of 
 honesty, diligence, truth, and holiness ; that he, too, 
 may share in the same joys, advantages, trials, bless- 
 ings, and sufferings, which befall others. The less 
 he thinks of himself as belonging to a separate, 
 special, kingdom and race, the more broadly and 
 deeply he learns to see that he is bound to others, as 
 others are bound to him ; that the two kingdoms of 
 
Chap. VI. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 123 
 
 light and darkness are, after all, one in the sight of 
 Him who made both ; the better will it be for him in 
 body, mind, and soul. For, the more heartily he 
 learns to believe this, the more and more will he see 
 and feel the crowning truth of all, that "no man 
 liveth or dieth unto himself." He will escape the 
 fatal peril of selfishness, and thus gain new life, new 
 hope, new joy, and content. If a blind boy be at all 
 trained and taught in this spirit, and then is for- 
 tunate enough to be admitted into a good Blind 
 School, his progress will be rapid and easy. His work 
 there will be a pleasure to himself, and to all who 
 have the difficult task of teaching him. Some, at 
 least, of the barriers which seem to divide him from 
 the power and life of seeing men will be broken 
 down, some of the difficulties removed, and the way 
 opened to that measure of success and of goodly fruit 
 to which every worker has a right to look, and 
 answering to the account which all must render of 
 talents given, time spent, and work done. 
 
124 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VII. 
 
 GHAPTEE VII. 
 
 fTIWO final topics — the general Statistics of Euro- 
 pean Blindness, and the Educational status of the 
 upper and middle class — yet require a few words. 
 Blindness has been supposed to become gradually 
 more prevalent as we get nearer to the Equator, and 
 fixed ratios of the Blind to the seeing have even been 
 given to different parallels of latitude. But, how- 
 ever ingenious or curious such a speculation may be, 
 there are at present no sufficient data to go upon. 
 There are other causes, far more powerful than cli- 
 mate, at work in tropical countries ; such as bad food, 
 unhealthy lodging, disregard of all sanitary laws, and 
 ignorance of ophthalmic surgery. And a glance at 
 the accompanying table from the last Census returns 
 will show that all reasoning from mere geographical 
 position is absolutely futile. 
 
Chap. VII. 
 
 THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 
 
 125 
 
 Norway 
 
 Sweden 
 
 Denmark 
 
 Prussia 
 
 Saxony 
 
 Hanover 
 
 Wurtemberg 
 
 Hesse Darmstadt 
 
 Oldenburg 
 
 Bavaria 
 
 France 
 
 Savoy 
 
 Piedmont 
 
 Belgium 
 
 Holland 
 
 United States of America 
 Newfoundland 
 
 Nova Scotia 
 
 Prince Edward's Island 
 
 Number 
 
 of 
 Blind. 
 
 2,759 
 
 2,566 
 
 1,710 
 
 10,205 
 
 1,606 
 
 1,196 
 
 1,198 
 
 696 
 
 167 
 
 2,362 
 
 38,413 
 
 614 
 
 5,683 
 
 3,675 
 
 1,990 
 
 12,635 
 
 86 
 
 185 
 
 43 
 
 Ratio 
 
 to 
 
 Population. 
 
 1 in 540 
 1,419 
 1,523 
 1,738 
 1,386 
 1,579 
 1,436 
 1,231 
 1,720 
 1,986 
 938 
 884 
 887 
 1,233 
 1,663 
 2,470 
 1,426 
 1,788 
 1,880 
 
 For example, why should the ratio in Norway be 
 1 in 540, while in the adjacent country it suddenly 
 sinks to 1 in 1400? or in poor little Denmark* to 
 1523 ? Why should Newfoundland, again, be so 
 widely apart from Prince Edward's Island as 1400 
 from 1880 ? And why should the United States of 
 America enjoy an immunity from blindness such as, 
 we believe, no other country in the world can boast ? 
 
 * It would be a curious point to inquire how far the common be- 
 lief in the strength and endurance of dark blue and grey eyes, over 
 brown and light blue, affects the light-haired, blue-eyed Norsemen. 
 
126 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VII. 
 
 the ratio of blind people to those with sight — if 
 American statistics are not worthless — being 1 in 
 2970 ; not one-half that of Great Britain. 
 
 The gist of the previous pages has mainly 
 applied to the lower and less-educated class of blind 
 persons. We have endeavoured to give our readers 
 some notion as to their numbers, occupation, and 
 general status, to show what has been done, and 
 what remains to be done, for them. Blindness in the 
 United States* seems just now to be on the increase ; 
 and though in England it would for the time appear 
 to be on the decrease, it may possibly again mount 
 to the ratio which it maintained twenty years ago ; 
 two of its stanchest allies, typhus and scarlet fever, 
 being almost as deadly as ever. In the mean while, 
 however, no provision whatever appears to be made 
 for the education of blind children of the upper class, 
 who stand in need of special teaching almost as much 
 as their poorer fellow-sufferers. The want of it con- 
 demns them to many a long, weary hour of darkness 
 and idleness which the poorer blind boy often escapes. 
 "Never," says a blind man, "is labour more labo- 
 rious, never is patience more tried, than when a blind 
 
 * See ' Report of Pennsylvania!! Institution for 1864,' p. 13. 
 
Chap. VII. THEIR WORKS AND "WAYS. 127 
 
 child sits with his hands before him in ever-during 
 darkness ; " whereas, " in work there is a perennial 
 and sacred nobleness. However benighted, or forgetful 
 of his high calling, there is always hope in a man 
 that actually and earnestly works ; in idleness alone 
 is there perpetual despair." * What is really needed 
 is a well-organised school or college t for the educa- 
 tion of children of both sexes from the upper ranks 
 of life, where they may be not only thoroughly 
 trained in all the special acquirements of the blind, 
 but, as far as possible, in all the other branches of 
 that wide and liberal education which is the heritage 
 of the seeing. The want of some such institution is 
 a very great and serious one, when it is remembered 
 to what utter shipwreck of all power, heart, and 
 hope in life, blindness condemns its victims — so great 
 and so intense that wise and good men in every age 
 have for a time given way to it; and even John 
 Milton, who grandly claims for himself and all his 
 fellow-sufferers, that they are the special care of the 
 
 * Bull, p. 172. 
 
 t Suck a college has, we believe, been at last just started under 
 the able direction of the Rev. W Taylor, near Worcester ; under the 
 patronage, it is said, of the Bishop of "Worcester, Lord Lyttleton, and 
 other influential friends. 
 
128 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VII. 
 
 Almighty, " dwelling under the shadow of His wings," 
 yet elsewhere mourns the loss of light in words of 
 pathetic and unequalled tenderness : — " Nos ab injuriis 
 hominum non modo incolumes, sed pene sacros divina 
 lex reddidit, divinus favor ; nee tarn oculorum hebe- 
 tudine quam coelestium alarum umbra has nobis fecisse 
 tenebras videtur."* And, elsewhere, with almost 
 equal grandeur and beauty of words, " If, as it is 
 written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
 every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, 
 why should not each likewise acquiesce in the reflec- 
 tion that he derives the benefit of sight, not from his 
 eyes alone, but from the guidance and providence 
 of the same Supreme Being ? Whilst He looks out, 
 and provides for me as He does, and leads me with. 
 His hand th.ro ugh the paths of life, I willingly sur- 
 render my own vision in conformity to His good 
 pleasure. And with a strong heart and steadfast, 
 Phalaris, I bid you farewell. It is not, however, 
 miserable to be blind; he only is miserable who 
 cannot acquiesce in his blindness with fortitude." To 
 him, indeed, the sun is dark and silent as the moon, 
 " Hid in her vacant iaterlunar cave." 
 
 Defens. Recuud. 
 
Chap. VII. THEIR WORKS AJTO WAYS. 129 
 
 Years come and go, cold and heat, summer and 
 winter, day and night ; but to him day returns not ; 
 nor golden dawn nor summer eve, nor spring flowers, 
 nor living creature, nor human face divine, 
 
 " But cloud instead, and ever-during dark 
 Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men 
 Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair 
 Presented with a universal blank." * 
 
 Thousands are still to be found in the same cloud 
 of darkness which fell about the pathway of Milton's 
 life ; few possibly having genius of kindred power 
 with his; but many doubtless of fair and goodly 
 talents, waiting, hoping, for some real work in life 
 which may never come. Our object has been to 
 show that their hope is a just one, that the need is 
 vital; of what kind that work should be, and the 
 noble fruit it will surely bear. It would be hard to 
 exaggerate the value, the beauty, and the interest 
 of such work when once achieved. None, indeed, 
 but He who made the eye can give sight to the 
 blind; but human hands and human hearts may 
 do much to help them ■ to find out their share in all 
 the privileges, joys, and responsibilities of human 
 
 * ' Paradise Lost.' Book iii. 45. 
 
 If 
 
130 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VII, 
 
 toil, and" in it to discover Him who has ' set up his 
 present kingdom here in this world of work, giving 
 to every man his task, and, when evening is come, 
 will give to each labourer his due wage of reward.* 
 
 * Sirion. 
 
Chap. VIII. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 131 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 \ LTHOUGH the lives of many Blind people, if 
 carefully examined, would no doubt, on the 
 whole, be found uneventful, there is still a large 
 number among them whose biographies, if they 
 could but be written, would be replete with interest. 
 But here, on the very threshhold of the work, we are 
 met by a difficulty that renders the biographer's 
 task a most difficult one ; and that is, the utter scan- 
 tiness of the materials with which he has to deal. 
 Even in the case of really famous blind people, he 
 now and then comes to sudden and bewildering 
 blanks. The date of the birth is recorded — then the 
 fatal calamity of blindness — and then follows a 
 whole block of years during which there is hardly a 
 trace of what befel the child in the first dreary days 
 of cloud ; nothing of how he began to learn^ when 
 the light first sprang up for him, what means his 
 
 k 2 
 
132 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. VIII. 
 
 friends took to alleviate his privation, or to help him 
 on towards true and happy toil of body and of mind. 
 For example, in the life of such a man as Saunderson 
 — from the time of his becoming blind at twelve 
 months old to his having done all he could at the 
 Free School of Pennistone — there is not a trace of 
 how he accomplished his work ; the period is all but 
 a dead blank. We read that he soon learned all 
 that school could teach him; that he then set to work 
 at home, almost single-handed, and yet in a few 
 years went up to Cambridge with the fame of a 
 great mathematician. But of the manner in which 
 he achieved this wondrous success, and of the way in 
 which he laid up his stores of learning, we know 
 nothing. 
 
 Of Zisca, the Bohemian Beformer, in the time of 
 John Huss and Jerome of Prague, we find that he 
 suddenly became blind from an arrow- wound in the 
 eye, and then we are simply told that " he was 
 more dreaded by the enemies of his country after he 
 became blind than he had been before the accident ;" 
 while, on his tomb at Craslow is inscribed, "Here 
 lies John Zisca, who having defended his country 
 against the encroachments of Papal tyranny, rests in 
 this hallowed place in spite of the Pope." Of John 
 
Chap. VIII. THEIR WOEKS AND WAYS. 133 
 
 ■Grower, the friend and companion of Chaucer — a poet 
 and the author of Ccmfessio Amantls — that he sud- 
 denly became blind in the first year of Henry the 
 Fourth, and that at his own expense he rebuilt the 
 famous and beautiful church of St. Mary Overie, 
 where his tomb is still to be seen. Of Henry Moyes, 
 the professor of chemistry, that he lost his sight at 
 three years old, and then comes a blank till he left 
 College; of John Troughton, blind from small-pox 
 at four years old, that he became Scholar and Fellow 
 of St. John's College, Cambridge ; and of Franciscus 
 Salinas, a.d. 1513, son of the treasurer of Burgos, 
 that, though blind from his birth, he became famous 
 as a Greek scholar, as an organist, and a3 a musical 
 writer. The mathematician, the warrior, the poet, 
 the chemist, the scholar, and the musician, in spite 
 of all difficulties, won their way to fame ; but of the 
 way in which they won the successive steps in this 
 arduous and noble task not a trace is to be found. 
 The very element in their lives which gives them 
 abiding interest is altogether omitted, and the reader 
 in most cases is driven to be content with such scanty 
 reminiscences as mark the career of every ordinary 
 man. Of Moyes it is said that he managed to 
 acquire a sound knowledge of music, mechanics, 
 
134 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. VIII. 
 
 geometry, optics, algebra, astronomy, chemistry, and 
 most of the branches of the Newtonian Philosophy ; 
 but as to how he acquired this knowledge, not a 
 word is told us. 
 
 The few biographical sketches, therefore, which 
 follow this chapter, must not be taken as including 
 the most interesting or most famous of Blind men, 
 but simply those of whom most is known of a suffi- 
 ciently accurate kind to afford materials for bio- 
 graphy. Other equally famous and equally interesting 
 names occur in the long list of remarkable men, 
 concerning too many of whom it may fairly and 
 justly be said, "nominis umbra manet;" but there 
 the biographer must stop. Of Milton, in the days 
 of his darkness, of Lucas, Gough, Eushton, James, 
 Stanley, John of Bohemia, " Blind Fielding " the 
 terror of Westminster thieves, Saunderson and Euler, 
 and a host of others, 
 
 " Each in their several order crowned," 
 
 one would willingly know a thousand details, but the 
 wish is a vain one ; and the few broken glimpses to 
 be obtained of such men as Huber and Metcalf only 
 serve to make our regret more pointed and more 
 fruitless. 
 
Chap. IX. FRANCIS HUBER. 135 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE BLIND NATUKALIST. 
 
 TVRANCIS HUBER was born at Geneva in July, 
 1750. His father, John Huber, the physician, 
 was a man of intelligence, wit, and imagination ; for 
 which, indeed, all his family were more or less famous, 
 being thought worthy of the regard and friendship 
 of Voltaire himself, the great mind of the sceptical 
 age in which he lived, who condescended not only 
 to read Huber's verses but to praise them at Ferney. 
 He was also a musician and a naturalist, and Francis 
 inherited most of his father's tastes. Geneva was 
 a place where literature was cultivated to some 
 extent, and though perhaps with more talk than 
 depth, young Francis acquired a taste for it, and 
 with great relish attended the public lectures at the 
 college, as well as the private ones of M. de Laussure 
 on physical science. On all these topics the boy 
 talked eagerly with his father at home, picking up 
 
136 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. IX. 
 
 knowledge in a desultory fashion, and even venturing 
 to dabble in some few experiments in search of the 
 philosopher's stone, which a relative had before tried 
 to his own ruin. He was a pleasant, lively, youth of 
 fifteen when the great trouble of his life befel him, 
 and his bright day darkened into night. As many 
 another precocious boy has done, he had injured his 
 health by overworking his brain ; and his eyes grew 
 weak from having too much to do. He could do 
 nothing in moderation; if at lessons he was ready 
 and eager to work incessantly all day, and many a 
 long hour at night which should have been spent 
 in quiet sleep was given to reading, poetry, and 
 romance. When his lamp failed him, he read, by 
 moonlight, and still further weakened the sight which 
 was already growing dim. Alarmed at this, his father 
 took him hastily off to Paris. But though the thought 
 of a visit to the great and gay city charmed the boy, 
 he was loath to say good-bye to his friends at Geneva, 
 and specially to his dear friend and companion at 
 the dancing-school, Marie Lullin, the daughter of 
 one of the syndics of the Eepublic. But good-bye 
 must be said even to one's sweetheart, and so after 
 many vows of unchanging affection the lovers were 
 parted; and to Paris went Francis Huber. There, 
 
Chap. IX. FRANCIS HUBBR. 137 
 
 Wenzel the oculist gave a gloomy verdict as to the 
 state of his eyes ; while a Dr. Tronchin, finding signs 
 of a tendency to consumption, sent him away to 
 Stein, a village near Paris, so as to be out of the 
 reach of books, and to find out the pleasure and 
 profit of idleness; the divine principle of leisure; 
 that life is not altogether a pursuit ; that there are 
 golden hours in it full of enrichment, when we may 
 feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness, when 
 
 " The grass hath time to grow in meadow lands, 
 And leisurely the opal, murmuring, sea 
 Breaks on its yellow sands." * 
 
 Here he led a quiet life among the fields and 
 hedgerows; watching the plough, the birds and 
 bees; gathering wild flowers, and thinking of 
 Marie Lullin. The days were long and happy, 
 because mind and body were gaining strength ; and 
 he had no doubt that her love was as true as his 
 own. But his sight was slowly fading, and when 
 at the age of seventeen he returned to Geneva, his 
 case was considered hopeless, while Wenzel dared 
 not run the risk of an operation for cataract. Huber 
 was then plainly told that he would shortly become 
 
 * Fraser. 
 
138 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. IX. 
 
 blind, and he bore the news with that steady and 
 calm courage which marked and gladdened the 
 whole of his long life. If only his betrothed was 
 true to him, he was content ; and true, indeed, she 
 was. Her father, the syndic, at once refused to give 
 his consent to their union. " My daughter," he said, 
 " shall not marry a blind man ; " but, for this very 
 reason, she considered herself more bound to him 
 than ever. "Now that he needs a guide to be 
 always with him," said she, "nothing shall ever 
 prevent our union." 
 
 It was in vain that her friends tempted her in a 
 thousand ways to break off the engagement, in vain 
 that her father tried to shake her firm determination. 
 She was proof against them all, and as she really 
 loved her betrothed, her affection was to him beyond 
 price. To his great joy, she answered that she would 
 wait till she had reached her majority — at the age of 
 twenty-five — and then be united to him whom she 
 had freely chosen. Seven long years were thus 
 spent in anxious waiting ; but they sped brightly 
 and pleasantly to Huber. The cloud which had 
 descended on him soon deepened into night, but he 
 bore it bravely, and for her sake who was willing to 
 share, and by sharing to lessen it, he even made 
 
Chap. IX. FRANCIS HUBER. 139 
 
 light of his trouble. He pretended to have more 
 sight than he really had, lest she should repent of 
 her constancy, often acting and speaking as if he 
 could see. And so firm a hold did this get of him 
 that in years long after he would still give way to 
 his old habit, boasting of beauties in some favourite 
 landscape which he knew only by hearsay, or from 
 faint recollection ; describing some dress, or even 
 face, that he had never seen. Deeper and darker 
 grew the cloud, until at last the seven years' trial 
 was ended, the wedding-bells rang, and Marie Lullin 
 was ready to plight her troth at the altar. .This was 
 the beginning of forty years' married life of almost 
 unbroken happiness. She was his friend, companion, 
 and a loving wife ; his reader, amanuensis, secretary 
 and — as he said — a good pair of eyes to him, a 
 right hand in all his troubles, and a light for his 
 darkest days. She was a dainty, diminutive, little 
 body, but full of life and vivacity ; answering well to 
 her husband's description of " mens magna in corpore 
 parvo."* "Were I not blind," he used to say, " I 
 should never know how truly one so afflicted could 
 
 It is to her he applies the character of his favourites the bees, — 
 " Ingentes animos angusto in pectore versant." 
 
140 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. IX. 
 
 be loved ; and to me my Marie is ever young, fresh, 
 and pretty." 
 
 She soon found many ways of alleviating his sad 
 calamity. Like all educated blind people, he was 
 always athirst for news; even the long war had 
 its attractions for him, and by the help of his wife 
 who formed armies of pins of various sizes, and stuck 
 them on to an embossed map, he was able to make 
 out the position of the various bodies of troops, and 
 form some notion of their movements. So happy 
 and full of sunshine was their married life, that even 
 the sneering philosopher of Ferney told of its bright- 
 ness, and Madame de Stael drew a picture of it in 
 her novel, ' Delphine.** But, happily for himself, and 
 for the rest of the world, he had tastes for other 
 things than military tactics; and his love for the 
 country, and country pursuits, led him to study the 
 little world of bees, to which the works of Reau- 
 mur and the conversation of his old friend Bonnet, 
 the naturalist, still more inclined him. And it was 
 
 * In this tale, Huher, under the name of M. Belmont, thus speaks 
 of his devoted wife : — " Elle a tout sacrifie pour moi, qui ne lui offiais 
 qu'une suite de jours pendant lesquels il fallait tout sacrifier encore. 
 Biche, jeune, brillaute, elle a voulu consacrer sa vie a un aveugle 
 sans fortune, et qui lui faisait perdre toute eelle qu'elle possedait." 
 — ' Delphine,' Pt. III., Lettre xviii. 
 
Chap. IX. FEANCIS HUBEK. 141 
 
 here, where the student has need of the keenest 
 sight, that the blind man won his fame. In this 
 his wife was ever ready to help him, but he had 
 the special help of a faithful and sagacious ser- 
 vant, Francois Burnens, whose eyes Huber specially 
 trained and taught for the work. At that time, he 
 says, "J'avois pour lecteur un domestique, qui s'in- 
 teressoit singulierement a tout ce qu'il me lisoit. Ce 
 n'est pas le premier example d'un homme, qui sans 
 education, sans fortune, et dans les circonstances les 
 plus defavorables ait ete appele par la nature seule a 
 devenir naturaliste." He tried Burnens at first with 
 little, simple, matters of observation, and in these the 
 scholar succeeded admirably ; and so by easy steps led 
 him on to take exact note of things requiring minute 
 and careful watching. His taste at last, says Huber, 
 became " une veritable passion, et je n'hesitai plus a, 
 Jui donner toute ma confiance; parfaitement assure 
 de voir bien en voyant par ses yeux." It is hard to 
 form a just idea of the patience and skill with which 
 Burnens carried out the various experiments. He 
 thought nothing of watching the working-bees of a 
 hive, which they suspected to be fertile, without 
 cessation for twenty-four hours — without even food 
 or rest, in order to surprise them at the time of 
 
142 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. IX. 
 
 laying their eggs. "Often," says his master, "I 
 reproached myself for putting his courage and 
 patience to such a trial ; but he was as interested as 
 I in the success of our experiments, and counted 
 pain and fatigue as nothing when compared with 
 their results." " If, then," he generously adds, " there 
 be any merit in these discoveries, I must share the 
 honour with him, and I rejoice to render him this act 
 of justice." 
 
 This is one more proof of Huber's truthful in- 
 tegrity, and it was, no doubt, in reference to Burnens 
 that he used to say, "I am much more certain of 
 what I state than you seeing people are, for you 
 publish only what your own eyes have seen ; I take 
 the mean among many witnesses." To the same 
 effect speaks Metcalf, the blind road-maker, when 
 questioned as to the accuracy of his work ; " You can 
 have recourse to your eye- sight whenever you want 
 to see anything, whereas I have my memory only, 
 but with one advantage; you see things readily, and 
 soon lose the impression ; I with difficulty master a 
 subject, and it is never obliterated." 
 
 This is what every really clever blind man is in- 
 clined to say, and taken "cum grano" it contains a 
 truth which, in Huber's case, was proved beyond all 
 
Chap. IX. FRANCIS HUBEE. 143 
 
 fear of challenge. At the time when he wrote, little 
 was accurately known of the life and habits of bees, 
 and, like every other enthusiast, in such a cause, he 
 had to encounter the full tide of prejudice and 
 ridicule which always besets bold investigation. It 
 was hard to believe that a blind man had discovered 
 facts which the wisest and keenest of sighted na- 
 turalists had failed to detect; and for a long time 
 cold water was bountifully thrown on all that he had 
 to say as a bee-master. But with the strong perti- 
 nacity of a blind man, conscious of his power, and 
 convinced of the accuracy of his researches, Huber 
 calmly held fast to the theories and facts which he 
 had announced ; gradually outliving both doubt and 
 ridicule, and at last seeing his discoveries verified in 
 almost every particular. He was the first to ascertain 
 that the nuptials* of the queen bee are celebrated in 
 the open air above the ken of ordinary vision, that wax 
 
 * " That the mother of so large a family, — says a charming 
 apiologist,— and queen of so rich a store, passes her honey-moon 
 somewhere may be reasonably supposed; but such is her innate 
 modesty, that the time and scene of her matrimonial trip are still 
 involved in some mystery, Whether she loves the pale moonlight, 
 or, as Huber supposes, she prefers a bright May morning, and, Hero- 
 like, lights her torch of love on high, she scrupulously shuns the 
 curious eye of man." This mystery Huber was the first to clear up. 
 
144 BLIND PEOPLE. 
 
 is produced from honey, that the queen is oviparous ; 
 that bees can at their pleasure by a special diet 
 transform the eggs of workers into queens ; and that 
 some working bees can lay productive eggs. He 
 pointed out clearly the use of antennae for purposes 
 of recognition and chat ; and the origin of swarming ; 
 the influence that the dimensions of the celis had on 
 the shape of the insects reared in them, the spinning 
 of silk by the larvae ; and numerous other facts of 
 their home life and work among the flowers — some 
 of which had, indeed, been previously suggested, but 
 the blind man was the first to demonstrate. He 
 explained the nature and origin of propolis, as well 
 as the escape of wax in flakes between the folds of 
 the abdomen ; and proved that the ventilation of the 
 hive is carried on by the incessant tremulous motion 
 of the bees' wings ; testing his researches by some 
 curious experiments on the germination and growth 
 of seeds within a hive, which depend on the amount 
 of oxygen contained in the air. 
 
 His own account of these researches is written with 
 clearness and spirit, as if his own eyes had seen every 
 detail, as a single paragraph will show. " Bees are 
 not immediately aware of the removal of their queen; 
 their labours at first are uninterrupted ; they watch 
 
Chap. IX. FRANCIS HUBEE. 145 
 
 over their young, and perform all their ordinary- 
 work; but, in a few hours, agitation ensues, tumult 
 spreads throughout the hive, ,A singular humming 
 is heard, the bees desert their young, and rush over 
 the surface of the combs in delirious agitation. They 
 find out that their queen is no longer with them. But 
 how? How do they know she is not on the next 
 comb ? I know not ; but I do know that on restoring 
 her, tranquillity is at once restored. They recognise 
 her. It is of no use to substitute another queen ; if 
 she is brought in within twelve hours of the removal 
 of the reigning sovereign, they pay her no respect. 
 But if after that, time, any such stranger the bees 
 treat as their own sovereign; They surround, seize, 
 and keep her a. long time captive* in an impenetrable 
 cluster, where she sometimes dies either from hunger 
 or want of air. On the 15th of August the bees had 
 been without a. queen for twenty-four hours, and I 
 then introduced a fertile queen. Instantly, the 
 workers near her. touched her with, their antennae, 
 and passing their trunks over every part of her 
 body, gave her honey. The first set then gave place 
 to others, who treated her exactly in the same way, 
 all vibrating their wings, and ranging themselves in 
 circles round her, as they retired. In a quarter of 
 
 L 
 
146 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. IX. 
 
 an hour she began to move, had a guard appointed, 
 and began to lay." 
 
 What writer with the sharpest ken could tell us 
 more than this ? And it is to be specially noted 
 with what exact care and point he brings out the 
 very details which the eye can best appreciate, for 
 which of course he must have relied on others, and 
 which his fellow students and readers, it is said, often 
 received with doubt and jealous suspicion. For more 
 than forty years his dear friends, the bees, occupied 
 and repaid his unwearied attention; but, like a wise 
 man, Huber had more than one string to his bow. 
 He had some taste for poetry, and real skill in 
 music, and to this latter pursuit he was indebted for 
 many happy hours. He had a good voice, and was 
 fairly acquainted with Italian music ; with knowledge 
 enough of thorough bass to harmonise a simple air 
 on the piano, and skill enough to retain what he 
 heard after one repetition. In these sunny hours he 
 had the help of his wife and sister, as well as that of 
 a lady herself blind, who to the last years of his 
 extreme old age was among the dearest of his friends, 
 He amused himself, too, with a small printing-press 
 framed somewhat on the principle of a manifold 
 writer, by the help of which he could print, fold, and 
 
Chap. IX. FRANCIS HUBEE. 147 
 
 seal a letter for himself. Wisely, too, he persisted 
 in taking daily walks about the country ; his restless, 
 energetic mind, soon growing weary of an inactive 
 body. He even ventured alone into the fields, and 
 by means of strings extended from point to point, 
 and held in his hand, he managed to steer from place 
 to place, a knot here and there reminding him of 
 any sudden turning, or angle in the path. He was 
 fond of ladies' society, and of pleasant voices ; being 
 himself always young and fresh in manner, and 
 ready to converse with any one who fell in his way. 
 " One thing," he used to say in his old age, " I am 
 never able to forget, and that is how to love." He 
 disliked, as most blind people do, to be pitied, or to 
 talk much of his privation ; but he never complained, 
 and let the conversation be as varied, sober, or 
 humorous as it might be, he could always hold his 
 own. He was not learned in the ordinary sense of 
 the term, says De Candolle, " but like a skilful 
 diver he had the happy knack of going to the 
 bottom of his subject," whence he came back not 
 without pearls. After the death of his wife, whose 
 loss he felt most deeply, his years fell into a quieter 
 channel, at' Lausanne, under the care of an affec- 
 tionate daughter. But, to the end, his life was 
 
 l 2 
 
148 BLIND PEOPLE. Ghap. IX* 
 
 marked by the same cheerful light, content, and 
 industry that adorned its fuller prime t The genial- 
 winter of old age found him as brave and serene as 
 in the days when he first courted .and won the heart 
 of pretty Marie Lullin. His old habits, his old pur- 
 suits and pleasures still charmed him, and not long ; 
 before his death his old passion for bees again peeped 
 out, when Professor Prevost procured and sent to 
 him a hive of the stingless bees, discovered by Cap- 
 tain Basil Hall at Tampico. It was a kindly, thought- 
 ful act to the old blind naturalist, and as such he 
 received it. His last days and last words were alike 
 peaceful, and he died in December, 1830, at the ripe 
 age of eighty-one, in full possession of all his facul- 
 ties to the last. 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METCALF. 149 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 JOHN METCALF, THE EOAD-MAKEE. 
 
 {Commonly called Blind Jack of KnaresboroughJ) 
 
 JOHN METCALF of Knaresborough really won 
 and deserved the name of Eoad-maker ; a title to 
 which, one would imagine, a blind man would never 
 aspire. ^Eet he was totally blind from his fourth year, 
 from small-pox, and being the son of poor labouring- 
 people, had the scantiest advantages in the shape 
 of education. But his parents must have given him 
 what few blind children inherit, activity of body 
 and mind, acuteness, mother-wit; and indomitable 
 perseverance ; all of which he possessed to an un- 
 usual degree. His life, of wonderful spirit and 
 adventure, has been told by himself, with no great 
 elegance, yet with truth and vigour; many of the 
 facts being corroborated not only by people of his 
 own locality, but by the actual roads which remain 
 as proofs of his genius. Many of the roads over the 
 Peak in Derbyshire were altered under his directions, 
 
150 
 
 BLIND PEOPLE. 
 
 Chap. X. 
 
 JOHN METCALF, THE BOAD-MAKIiR." 
 
 * For permission to use this graphic Woodcut we are indebted 
 to the ready courtesy of S. Smiles, Esq. 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METCALF. 151 
 
 especially those near Buxton ; but his greatest triumph 
 perhaps was in completing the nine miles of the 
 Manchester Eoad from Blackmoor to Standish Foot, 
 for a considerable way across some deep marshes; 
 and of this work it will be well to add a few par- 
 ticulars when we have glanced at his life. 
 
 From his very childhood he must have been a 
 boy of untiring pluck and spirit; nothing daunted 
 him, nothing was suffered to be an obstacle when 
 he had once made up his mind to succeed. Not 
 content with climbing trees, as other boys did, for 
 birds'-nests, he often ventured on a bough which they 
 feared to trust; he robbed orchards, he rode races 
 with his companions at full gallop; and in a year 
 or two could find his way through every part of 
 Knaresborough without a guide. . His father kept 
 a horse or two, and Jack, thus able to get a mount, 
 often managed in some way to join the neighbouring 
 hunt of Squire Woodburn, and, as he said, " to see 
 his hare killed." He not only learned to swim in 
 the river Nidd, but would seize on his companions, 
 plunge them below the surface, and in short swim 
 over them ; or if one sank to the bottom, Metcalf 
 would dive for him and bring him safe to land. 
 As he grew up, we find him with equal spirit and 
 
152 BLIND PEOPLE.'. Chap. X. 
 
 equal success, earning money By playing the fiddle 
 at. country feastings, fairs, and waits; or during the 
 season, at the Queen's Head, Harrogate; and for 
 a wonder he was thrifty : and saved money. He 
 bought a horse of his own, and rode him at York 
 Races, trusting, it would seem, mainly to his horse's 
 sagacity both in the field and on the race-course, — 
 which rarely failed him. Returning late at night 
 to Knaresborough, he would serve as a guide to 
 any who had lost their way; and it was on some 
 such occasion that meeting a gentleman utterly 
 unable to find his way along the intricate roads 
 between York and Harrogate, Jack offered his 
 services. They were both on horseback, and Metcalf 
 took the lead. All went well for a considerable 
 distance, until they got near to a gate on the 
 Knaresborough road which the guide was afraid of 
 missing. But here his quick wit did him good 
 service. A current of wind through an opposite 
 park-gate (of wbich he knew the position) told 
 him where he was, and he at once turned his horse's 
 head to the entrance he sought for. It was a 
 difficult gate to open; and Metcalf at once -threw 
 the blame on his horse, " Confound thee ! " said he, 
 " thou always goest to the heel instead of the headJ' 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METCALF. 153 
 
 Whereupon, the stranger observed that his own 
 horse was good at coming up to a gate, and at 
 pnce, to his guide's satisfaction, opened it; and so 
 they made their way on towards Knaresborough. 
 Passing through the town, they entered the forest, 
 then unenclosed, and before long arrived safely 
 at Harrogate. Metcalf knew the inn well, and 
 quickly led both horses into the stable, and then 
 going back into the house found his companion 
 at the bar, busy over a tankard of negus of which 
 he offered some to his guide. Jack took the tankard 
 readily the first time, but his second attempt being 
 rather wide of the mark, he left the room. " He's 
 been drinking," said the traveller to the landlord, 
 "that's clear, and I see it in his eyes." "Eyes," 
 replied Boniface, "what do you mean by eyes? 
 Don't you know that he is blind?" "Blind! — 
 landlord — no, no ; have him in." Metcalf was soon 
 called, and told his own story.. "Had I known 
 you were blind," said the stranger, " I would not 
 have ventured with you for a hundred guineas." 
 "And I," said Metcalf, "would not have missed 
 my way for a thousand." And then host, traveller, 
 and guide, set to work on a good supper. 
 
 In some adventures or other of this kind :he was 
 
154 ,' BLIND PEOPLE. .Chap. X. 
 
 continually engaged, and always managed to come 
 out of them with success. Though he was stone- 
 blind, he was always ready to join in sports and 
 games which at first sight seem utterly beyond 
 the reach of a blind man. He was a clever whist 
 player; he played well at bowls, receiving the 
 odds of a bowl extra for each eye ; and thus having 
 three chances to his opponent's one, by placing 
 one friend at the jack, and another half-way towards 
 it, he managed to judge well of the whole distance. 
 He was a good wrestler and boxer, and standing 
 six feet two in his shoes, few dared to enter the 
 ring with him,' far less to attempt playing any 
 practical joke with him as a blind man. At all 
 these sports, as well as cock-fighting, he betted 
 freely, and seems, with the help of a friend, in most 
 cases to have come off the winner; some sharp 
 fellows, no doubt, being ready enough to bet with 
 a man who, from his affliction, must be supposed 
 to know less than they did of the sport. On one 
 occasion he even yentured to ride his own horse 
 at Forest Moor Eaces, and gained the wager. The 
 race was on the open down, and posts were set up 
 describing a circle of about a mile, the course being 
 thrice round the circle, to which it was supposed 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METCALF. 155 
 
 that a blind rider could not possibly keep. But 
 Metcalf stationed a man •with a bell at each of 
 the posts, and by clever management and a quick 
 ear contrived to keep fairly to the course, rode 
 well to the front, and amidst the shouts of all but 
 his opponents came in first by a good length. 
 Clever as a jockey, he gradually gained a knowledge 
 of horse-flesh, buying and selling horses, with profit 
 to himself, even in canny Yorkshire. In this way 
 he became more and more widely known throughout 
 the county, and being full of spirit, of good address, 
 a strong arm, and a stout heart, he soon grew to 
 be a favourite among the fair sex; and especially 
 with one Mary Benson, daughter of the landlord of 
 The Q-ranby at Harrogate. She was a fine dashing 
 girl, and really loved him when he scarcely had 
 courage to declare his passion. But they soon came 
 to an understanding ; and as her mother was strongly 
 opposed to the match, many a device was used to 
 keep secret their affection, and to contrive oppor 
 tunities for meeting. This was done for a time, 
 when Metcalf having been called away on business, 
 advantage was taken of his absence to bring forward 
 a rival suitor; and so well did he prosecute his 
 suit that the banns were published and the wedding- 
 
156 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. X. 
 
 day. fixed, just as poor Jack came back to Harrogate, 
 little knowing what had happened. Indeed, he was 
 riding by the inn on the very day before the 
 marriage, when a stable-boy whispered into his ear 
 the mysterious message, "" One wants to speak with 
 you." He well knew who the " one " was, and very 
 soon had heard the whole story. An elopement 
 was planned for that night, carried out with great 
 spirit, and resulted in a happy marriage the next 
 morning ; to the great chagrin of Mr. Dickenson, 
 his rival, who had prepared a feast for two hundred 
 people, and the great anger of Mrs. Benson, who 
 refused either to see the bride or give up her clothes.; 
 The old lady kept to her bitter vow till the birth 
 of her son-in-law's second child, when like a true 
 woman she stood ~ sponsor to her grandchild, and 
 gave up the bride's dowry. When Mary was asked 
 how she came to refuse so many good offers ta 
 marry a blind man, she replied, "I could not be. 
 happy without him; his actions are so singular, and 
 his spirit is so manly, that I couldn't help liking- 
 him." She made Metcalf an excellent wife, for 
 forty years; dying in the year 1788, and leaving, 
 him with four children in his sixty-first year. 
 
 These forty years were spent in an infinite variety 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METCALF. 157 
 
 of adventures, all curious, and many of them almost 
 
 incredible in the life of a blind man ; among which 
 
 not the least curious is that of his joining the army. 
 
 At the breaking out of the rebellion in 1745, one 
 
 Captain Thornton resolved to raise a company at 
 
 his own expense, and invited Metcalf to join the 
 
 troop. "Jack" set to work with his usual spirit, and, 
 
 acting as assistant to a sergeant, in a couple of days 
 
 collected about a hundred and forty volunteers, of 
 
 whom sixty were drafted into the army then under 
 
 General Wade. The blind man acted as bugler, 
 
 was present at several of the engagements which 
 
 followed ; and, not without many adventures, after 
 
 the fatal battle of Culloden, found his way safely 
 
 back to Eharesborough, where he seems to have 
 
 settled down to a quieter life. At the previous 
 
 battle of Falkirk Metcalf ran some considerable 
 
 risk of his life. "It was," says his biographer, 
 
 Mr. Smiles, "a grossly mismanaged battle on the 
 
 part of the Koyalists, and the result was a total 
 
 defeat. Twenty of Thornton's men were made 
 
 prisoners with the -lieutenant and ensign; the captain 
 
 himself only escaping by taking refuge in a poor 
 
 woman's house at Falkirk, where he lay hid for 
 
 many days." When Metcalf got back to Edinburgh 
 
158 PLIND PEOPLE. , Chap. X. 
 
 with the defeated army, some of the dragoon officers, 
 hearing of his escape, sent for him to Holyrood, 
 to question him about Thornton. They clearly 
 thought to have some fun with him about his own 
 escape; but Jack's ready wit never failed him. 
 " How did you manage," said one, "to escape safely ?" 
 "Oh," was the ready answer, "it was easy enough 
 to follow the sound of the dragoons' horses — they 
 made such a clatter over the stones when flying from 
 the Highlandmen." 
 
 Meanwhile nothing had been heard of Thornton ; 
 and Metcalf, who was much attached to his captains 
 beginning to be anxious about his fate, determined 
 to go back to Falkirk for tidings. He arrived safely 
 at the outposts of Prince Charles's camp, and by 
 joining one of the rebel spies, and pretending that 
 he wished for employment as a musician in the ser- 
 vice, made his way at last to the royal head-quarters. 
 But of the captain nothing could be heard, and 
 Metcalf, being unluckily recognised by some camp- 
 follower who had seen him at Harrogate, was seized 
 on as a suspicious character, put into prison, and 
 brought to a court-martial. But no evidence could 
 be brought against him ; he was released, at length, 
 made his escape from the camp, and got back to 
 
Chap. X; JOHN METCALF. 159 
 
 Edinburgh, where, to his great joy, he found his 
 captain alive and well. 
 
 In January, 1746, the Duke of Cumberland, in 
 full pursuit of the Highlanders, halted at Aberdeen, 
 where a ball was given by his officers ; and Metcalf's 
 services again came into requisition for the music 
 of the country-dances which he only could play. 
 And here, it is said, he played with his usual spirit 
 for eight hours at a stretch, standing on a chair, and 
 attracting the notice of the Duke himself, who next 
 morning sent him a couple of guineas, which, how- 
 ever, Metcalf spent on a treat to the Duke's servants. 
 
 This taste of military life seems to have been 
 quite enough for him ; and his next adventures in 
 the woollen trade to and from Aberdeen, in the buy- 
 ing and selling of horses between Yorkshire and 
 Edinburgh, and, if report speaks truly, in a little 
 clever contraband trade which he carried on in various 
 parts of the country, were all of a far quieter kind. 
 But all these occupations made him more and more 
 thoroughly acquainted with the state of the northern 
 roads ; and whether " as a guide to those who could 
 see, as a musician, soldier, chapman, fish-dealer, horse- 
 dealer, or waggoner," his experience was gradually 
 ripening for the great work of his life. " He could 
 
160 BLIND PEOPLE; Chap. X. 
 
 measure timber," says his biographer,* " or hay in 
 the stack, and rapidly reduce , their contents to feet 
 and 'inches after a mental process of his own." -Nor 
 can there, indeed, be any doubt, that if he had not 
 lost his sight, he would have been one of the most 
 remarkable men of his age ; and, as it was, he soon 
 "became one of the greatest road -makers and 
 builders." Having once made up his mind to under- 
 take the business of road-building, he proceeded with 
 his usual impetuosity. His first essay was to take 
 the. contract for three miles of new road between 
 JVlinskip and Fearnsby, which he completed with 
 unusual . despatch and economy, to the entire satis- 
 faction of his employers. He afterwards built bridges, 
 repaired roads, or built new ones, with equal ease, 
 despatch, and economy ; and was able to boast, without . 
 fear of being challenged, that his work stood the 
 test of time and heavy traffic when that of other 
 contractors had utterly failed. " The total extent 
 of turnpike-roads thus constructed by him was about 
 180 miles, for which he received, altogether, about 
 sixty-five thousand pounds." And in all these under- 
 , akings he not only planned and originated the whole 
 
 * "Smiles' s ' Engineers.' 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METOALF. 161 
 
 scheme, but by his own personal exertions among 
 the workmen brought in that element of living vigour 
 without which lasting success rarely comes. He 
 thought nothing of walking to Knaresborough in the 
 morning with four or five stones of meal on his 
 shoulders, and joined his men by six o'clock, going 
 from place to place, and busily superintending 
 throughout the day. " Many a time," says Dr. Bew, 
 " I have met this extraordinary man traversing roads, 
 ascending steep and rugged heights, exploring valleys, 
 and investigating their extent, form, and situation, 
 so as to answer his designs in the best manner ; his 
 plans and estimates being all prepared in a method 
 peculiar to himself, of which he cannot well convey 
 the meaning to others. And so great are his abili- 
 ties, that he finds constant employment. He is now 
 constructing a new road between Wilmslow and 
 Congleton, to open a communication with the great 
 London road without passing over the mountains. I 
 met him while engaged in making this very survey, 
 and it was astonishing to hear with what accuracy 
 he described its course and the nature of the different 
 soils through which it was conducted, specially men- 
 tioning one boggy piece of ground, " that it was the 
 only place he had any doubts of, where he feared 
 
 M 
 
162 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. X. 
 
 they had, contrary to his directions, been too sparing 
 of their materials." 
 
 This mention of boggy ground naturally brings 
 us to notice the famous nine miles of road which he 
 made from Blackmoor to Standish Foot. The sur- 
 veyor had laid down the line of road across some 
 deep marshes, out of which, said the trustees, the 
 soil would have to be removed till they came to a 
 solid foundation. This plan appeared to Metcalf 
 difficult, tedious, and expensive; and he did his 
 very utmost to persuade the trustees of the justice 
 of his opinion. But the trustees of the country-road 
 were as impracticable as such men usually are, holding 
 to their own opinion, until Metcalf proposed to make 
 the road, by a route of his own, across the marshes, 
 after his own plan; and if that failed, to make it 
 anew after the surveyor's, at his own cost. To this 
 they agreed ; and Metcalf having engaged to finish 
 nine miles in ten months, began his work in six 
 different parts, with nearly four hundred men, one 
 of the worst places being across Standish Bog, where 
 no road seemed at all practicable. The first part 
 of his plan was to cut a deep canal on either side 
 of the proposed road, throwing the soil as it was 
 cleared out on to the roadway. He then ordered his 
 
Chap. X. JOHN METCALP. 163 
 
 men to collect a quantity of heather or ling, and 
 bind it in bundles which could be spanned by the 
 hand. These bundles he laid down firmly side by 
 side, with another row laid transversely above them, 
 and then overlaid the whole with stony rubble and 
 gravel, laid on from broad-wheeled waggons, and 
 thoroughly pressed down to form a level road. This 
 formed one of the driest and best portions of the 
 whole route, and for twelve years needed no repair, 
 its main principle being the very one long afterwards 
 adopted by the famous George Stephenson in carrying 
 the rails across Chat Moss. 
 
 The last road that Metcalf built was between 
 Haslingden and Accrington, in 1792, when he had 
 reached his seventy -fifth year, and was still hale, 
 hearty, and of lusty strength both of mind and body ; 
 as full of life and vigour as most, men at forty. He 
 spent the last years of his long life in his quiet farm- 
 house at Spofforth; and there, at length, at the 
 patriarchal age of ninety-three, he finished his event- 
 ful life in the year 1810. He had many children, 
 and the kindly hands of friends about him to the 
 last, to all of whom he seems to have been dear. 
 Ninety great-grand children are said to have sur- 
 vived him. A few old people are yet to be found 
 
 m 2 
 
164 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. X. 
 
 in the neighbourhood who still remember the famous 
 blind man. One recalls his poking about with a 
 long stick, and by a happy knack finding out all the 
 places in the road which needed mending; while 
 another still bears in mind (setat. 89) the day when 
 she, as the landlord's daughter, waited on "Jack" 
 at the village inn, and was once greeted with, " Here 
 lass, come and have a game wi' me, an thoo'l be able 
 to say when thoo's an auld woman, thoo's played 
 cards wi' Blind Jack." The memory of such a man 
 lingers long in his native place. There have been 
 blind men of greater genius and more showy acquire- 
 ' ments, but as one who by dint of resolute pluck 
 and indomitable perseverance, unwearied industry 
 and unbroken cheerfulness, resolved not to be cut 
 off from the works and ways of seeing men, John 
 Metcalf of Knaresborough stands almost alone. 
 
Chap. XL JOHN STANLEY. 165 
 
 CHAPTEK XL 
 
 JOHN STANLEY, THE BLIND MUSICIAN. 
 
 TT is much to be regretted that few particulars can 
 be gathered as to the life of John Stanley, the 
 blind musician, for he is one of the few such musicians 
 who seems to have possessed real genius, as distin- 
 guished from merely mechanical skill. James Wilson, 
 his biographer (himself blind), opens his short sketch, 
 after the usual random fashion of blind critics, and 
 having first given utterance to a doubt whether " the 
 English have any national music," and admitted that 
 " they are by no means unacquainted with the prin- 
 ciples of that delightful science," calmly informs us 
 that, "as a composer, few could equal" his hero, 
 " while as a performer he had perhaps no superior." 
 
 Stanley was born in the year 1713, and within two 
 years of that time became totally blind by falling 
 heavily on a stone floor with a china basin in his hand, 
 portions of the broken china cutting open his face 
 
166 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XL 
 
 and fatally injuring his eyes. How he spent his 
 childhood, what education he received, or where he 
 received it, is not known. But at seven years old we 
 find him busy enough at music, learning the organ 
 first from John Beading, a pupil of Dr. Blow's, and 
 then, with still greater and more rapid success, study- 
 ing it under Dr. Green. He took intense delight in 
 all kinds of music, and; when a boy of only eleven, 
 was remarkable for his ready skill as a player among 
 a wide circle of friends. Gradually the circle ex- 
 panded, and having in 1724 obtained the post of 
 organist at All-Hallow's, Bread-street, two years later, 
 when in his fourteenth year, he was chosen out of a 
 host" of candidates to take the like post at St. An- 
 drew's, Holborn. Here he had a noble instrument, 
 and this he learned to manage with such exquisite 
 skill as attracted and delighted thousands beyond the 
 ordinary congregation, including some of the first 
 musicians of the day. Nor was he known merely as 
 an organist. He was the conductor of many well- 
 known public concerts,* and when blindness befell 
 Handel, assisted Christopher Smith, the great musi- 
 cian's pupil, in superintending and conducting the 
 
 Mr, Wilson says, " their eouI." 
 
Chap. XI. JOHN STANLEY. 167 
 
 performance of his famous oratorios during Lent ; 
 and this he continued to do for thirty years, long 
 after Handel's death, almost up to the time of his 
 own decease in 1786. He also held the office of 
 Master of the King's private band, and clearly worked 
 as hard at his profession as could be expected of a 
 blind man ; and thus for a time made himself known 
 among the fashion of London. But it is more than 
 doubtful whether his two famous oratorios, ' Jephtha ' 
 and ' Zimri,' his ' Solemn Ode ' on the Death of King 
 George II., or his dramatic Pastoral of ' Arcadia,' are 
 known even by name to the keenest and best-read of 
 modern musicians; though the Pastoral was per- 
 formed with some degree of state at Covent Garden 
 just after the marriage of George III. and Queen 
 Charlotte. His compositions must, we suppose, have 
 lacked that living element of originality and spark- 
 ling freshness which marks all genius of the highest 
 rank. Of his masterly skill in the management of 
 the organ, one single incident is a sufficient proof. 
 At a public performance of one of Handel's ' Te 
 Deums' the organ was found to be half a note too 
 sharp for the other instruments in the orchestra; 
 whereupon Stanley, who was conducting the music, 
 instead of requiring that the violins should be screwed 
 
168 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XL 
 
 up to the organ's higher range, at once, without pre- 
 meditation, transposed the whole piece to suit them 
 into a lower key. This was the more remarkable 
 because the new key was the remote one of C sharp 
 major. 
 
 No wonder, therefore, that thousands often crowded 
 to St. Andrew's and to the Temple Church to hear the 
 famous blind man ; nor are we surprised to find his 
 pupil, Dr. Alcock, saying, "It was common enough 
 in my day, just as the service at St. Andrew's or in 
 the Temple was ended, to see forty or fifty organists 
 near the altar eagerly waiting to hear his last volun- 
 tary ; and even Handel himself was often to be found 
 among them." * 
 
 Stanley possessed the blind man's usual facility in 
 at last finding his way alone about the different parts 
 of the city where his work called him ; and this 
 knowledge, says Alcock, extended " even to West- 
 minster and the adjacent villages." So keen and 
 correct was his ear, that he never forgot the voice of 
 
 * Some years after Handel had become blind, he was recom- 
 mended by Dr. Sharpe to get the help of Stanley in playing the organ 
 at his Oratorios. " No, Doctor, no," was the reply; " you have for- 
 gotten where it is written, 'If the blind lead the blind, both shall 
 fall into the ditch.' " 
 
Chap. XI. JOHN STANLEY. 169 
 
 any person he had once heard speak, and, like Blind 
 Tom, would accompany with thorough bass any air 
 on the piano, though heard for the first time. Walk- 
 ing through Pall Mall in 179J), he was met by a 
 gentleman who had been in Jamaica for twenty 
 years, and in passing said, in a feigned voice, " How 
 do you do, Mr. Stanley?" The blind man hesitated 
 but a moment, and then quickly answered, " God 
 bless me, Mr. Smith! how long have you been in 
 England?" 
 
 Like Metcalf, he was a good rider, and when living 
 at Epping knew many of the roads through the 
 forest, and could point out all the famous views to 
 his friends. He was a good whist-player, the cards 
 being finely marked for him at the corner with a 
 needle ; so finely indeed that it was not easy to see 
 the marks which his keen touch at once detected ; 
 while even at billiards and skittles he often beat 
 his companions. 
 
 He died in May, 1786, and was buried at St. Andrew's, 
 Holborn. Partly a cotemporary of Stanley's, and in 
 England during a part of his career, was another 
 famous blind musician, Mademoiselle Theresa Paradis, 
 an Austrian lady, who at the age of two years be- 
 came blind from excessive fear at an outcry of fire and 
 
170 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XL 
 
 murder, suddenly raised at midnight in her father's 
 house. She showed great taste for music from an 
 early age, and at ten years old could play with skill 
 and ease on the piano and organ ; heing able to sing 
 in the ' Stabat Mater ' of Pergolesi at St. Augustine's 
 before the Empress. In 1780 her fame as a musician 
 had spread more widely, and she visited the chief 
 courts and cities of Europe, where her playing at- 
 tracted great notice. She arrived in England during 
 the same year, and played before their Majesties at 
 Windsor, as well as at many public concerts, Cramer, 
 himself a masterly musician, took great interest in 
 her career, and was charmed with her playing ; but 
 Madame Paradis seems to have had little skill as a 
 composer, and has left behind her no record of her 
 genius. It was partly to see Stanley that Joseph 
 Strong, the blind mechanic and organ-builder of Car- 
 lisle, while quite a youth, made his way on foot from 
 Cumberland to London, and with Stanley's help gained 
 further insight into his trade, by examining some of 
 the great organs of the metropolis. Strong lived to 
 build several organs after his trip to London, and 
 one of these is still said to be in existence in the Isle 
 of Man. 
 
 It was in 1752, when Stanley was in his fortieth 
 
Chap. XI. JOHN STANLEY. 171 
 
 year, that the great musician Handel himself became 
 blind from gutta serena. - Jephtha/ the last of his 
 great works, was, indeed, the " Song of the Swan ;" it 
 had been slowly finished in the preceding year, his 
 sight failing him as he filled up the orchestral parts 
 of the Third Act, of which the manuscript still re- 
 mains to show that his vision was no longer clear 
 when he traced the last notes. He was couched 
 three times in 1752 by Bramfield, Surgeon to the 
 Princess of Wales, but all in vain. He who had with 
 such solemn and intense pathos sung the darkened 
 sorrow of the Israelite, blind, desolate, and in prison, 
 now fell into the darkness himself. The blow, at 
 first, affected him most deeply; but gradually the 
 good old man revived, his faith and courage never 
 failed him, he grew resigned, and resolved to continue 
 his oratorios. In the course of the next year, 1753, 
 ' Samson ' was performed, and the author, who was 
 present, in spite of all his moral courage, could not 
 listen unmoved to the passionate sorrow of " Total 
 eclipse ! No sun, no moon ! " And then it was the 
 audience perceived the grand old man, who was 
 seated at the organ, grow pale and tremble at the 
 power of his own music; and with many cries of 
 applause, and many unbidden tears, he was led for- 
 
172 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XL 
 
 ward to the front of the orchestra, and welcomed 
 with the loud, but respectful, homage of the whole 
 assembly. He ' lived for six years after this, all 
 marked by the same noble resignation and courage ; 
 still earnest in his passion for music, and still con- 
 ducting his oratorios, up to the very date of his death, 
 April 13, Good Friday, 1759 ; on the 6th of which 
 month he had himself conducted his masterpiece, 
 the ' Messiah,' at Oovent Garden. A week later his 
 pupil, Smith, took his place as conductor to the 
 same oratorio at the Foundling Hospital, which the 
 managers calmly announced by inserting in their 
 advertisement the words " in place of the late G. F. 
 Handel, Esq." On the 24th of May, however, it 
 occurred to these gentlemen that a word or two in 
 memorial of Handel would not be out of place, and 
 they accordingly advertised a "Performance of Sa- 
 cred Music in grateful memory of Gr. F. Handel, Esq., 
 under the direction of Mr. Christopher Smith. Mr. 
 John Stanley will also perform a Concerto on the 
 Organ. Gentlemen to come without swords, and 
 ladies without hoops." 
 
 It was at the Foundling that during the following 
 years this same oratorio was performed nine times by a 
 full orchestra, with Stanley at the organ ; and never, 
 
Chap. XI. JOHN STANLEY. 173 
 
 we may be sure, without a kindly remembrance of his 
 sturdy and faithful old friend the author. 
 
 Handel was buried on the 24th of April, in Poet's 
 Corner, in the presence of a great concourse of people 
 of all ranks, his funeral sermon being preached in the 
 Abbey by the Bishop of Rochester. 
 
 In spite of his occasional roughness and coarseness 
 of speech, there can be no doubt that he was at heart 
 a deeply religious man. It is said, on good authority, 
 that he never sat down to work at the ' Messiah ' 
 without prayer to Him whose name it bore ; and 
 when engaged in the great Hallelujah Chorus, he 
 says in his broken English, " I did think I did see all 
 heaven before me, and the great God himself." 
 
 Some days before his death he expressed a strong - 
 wish that he might die on the Good Friday, " that he 
 might be with his dear Lord and Saviour on the day 
 of His resurrection ; " and the consolation was not 
 denied him. 
 
174 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XII. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 NICHOLAS SAUNDEESON, THE BLIND 
 MATHEMATICIAN. 
 
 AUNDEBSON was born at Thurlston, in York- 
 shire, in the year 1682, and when but a few months 
 old lost not only his sight, but his very eyeballs, by the 
 small-pox; so that no recollection of light, or any 
 seen object, could have availed him in after life. His 
 father was a shrewd, hard-headed, exciseman, of small 
 means which hardly sufficed for the support of a 
 large family. But he did what he could for all of 
 them, and especially for Nicholas, his blind son, who 
 was sent to the Free School at Pennistone, and there 
 managed, in spite of his blindness, to pick up a sound 
 grammatical knowledge of the Latin and Greek lan- 
 guages ; as well as some mathematical knowledge, for 
 which, from the very first, he showed great aptitude. 
 Under his father's teaching at home the boy soon 
 learned to master the common rules of arithmetic. 
 
Chap. XII. NICHOLAS SAUNDEKSON. 175 
 
 and there were few questions which he could not at 
 once solve in his head by dint of a clever memory. 
 Gradually such questions took a higher and wider 
 range ; no ordinary difficulties puzzled him, and if a 
 common rule did not satisfy or please him in dealing 
 with a difficult problem, he often invented a new one 
 for himself. In his eighteenth year he had made 
 such progress as to understand with ease the works 
 of Euclid, Diophantus, Archimedes, and Newton, in 
 their original languages ; aud such books as his father 
 could not procure he was fortunate enough to obtain 
 from friends, who, perceiving that they had to deal 
 with a man of high intellect and genius, did all they 
 could to help him on his way. Among these were a 
 Mr. West, of Underbank, and a Dr. Nettleton, who 
 not only supplied him with all necessary books, but 
 had him instructed in the higher branches of Algebra 
 and Geometry. Thus stimulated and thus helped, 
 genius like Saunderson's soon began to bear fruit, 
 and ere long the scholar had- surpassed his teachers. 
 He seemed at times to arrive by a sort of instinct at 
 results to which they could but point a narrow, long, 
 and intricate path ; and to solve by intuition problems 
 which others had to deal with by strict rule. 
 For a time, after this, he was sent to a private 
 
176 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XII. 
 
 school at Attercliffe, near Sheffield; but logic and 
 metaphysics — the two chief studies there — were not 
 to his taste ; and he went back to his own home, 
 resolved to study, after his own fashion, the subjects 
 to which his special taste and genius led him. Books 
 and a good reader were his chief wants, and these his 
 father, the exciseman, did his utmost to supply, and 
 with the help of friends succeeded. After a few years 
 of quiet, diligent, study, during which Saunderson's 
 fame as a mathematician became more and more, 
 widely known, he gained the friendship of Joshua 
 Dunn, a fellow-commoner of Christ's College, who 
 generously took him to Cambridge, and obtained per- 
 mission for him to reside in the College, though 
 he was not admitted as a member of the house. Here 
 he had books in abundance, abundant leisure for 
 quiet study, and teachers well able to assist him if 
 he needed help. It was soon found, however, that 
 the blind man needed no help ; on the contrary, that 
 he could teach others, even in the highest range of 
 mathematical science. His next step was to give 
 Lectures on the Newtonian Philosophy, which he did 
 with brilliant success to a large class of students ; 
 with the free permission and good-will of Whiston, 
 then Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, and the 
 
Chap. XII. NICHOLAS SAUNDEBSON. 177 
 
 approval of Sir Isaac Newton himself, whose friend- 
 ship he had just gained. 
 
 The Blind genius was now rising to his due posi- 
 tion ; and his power as a teacher began to be known 
 and felt in the University, until the year 1711, when 
 Whiston was deprived of his office for holding certain 
 heretical opinions, and by the interest of Newton 
 Saunderson was chosen to succeed him. Queen Anne 
 was applied to on the blind Professor's behalf, and a 
 royal mandate readily granted for conferring on him 
 the degree of M.A. necessary to qualify him for the 
 Professorship. His Latin inauguration discourse is said 
 to have been remarkable for its classical purity, and 
 to have smacked far more of Cicero than the lan- 
 guage of the mathematical schools usually does; 
 though no trace of the oration is now to be found. 
 
 He now gave himself up more keenly than ever to 
 the duties of his office, and "for the succeeding twelve 
 years continued to reside at Christ's College, winning 
 higher and yet higher fame as a teacher. In 1723 
 he took a house in Cambridge, and there began his 
 married life; his wife being the daughter of a Mr. 
 Dickens, the Eector of Coxworth, a lady with whom 
 he had previously been long acquainted, and by 
 whom he had two children. Whether the union 
 
 N 
 
178 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XII. 
 
 was a happy one, and whether his married life was 
 of cloud or sunshine, no record remains to tell 
 us; but, in any case, it was not a lengthy one; 
 for in 1739 some scorbutic affection of the blood 
 suddenly increased upon him, and, after a short 
 illness, he died at Coxworth, and was buried in the 
 chancel of the parish church, in the fifty-seventh 
 year of his age. Mathematics had been the great 
 passion of his life, and to this study he had given his 
 time, thought, and strength. The sedentary nature 
 of these pursuits, and of his own habits as a blind 
 man, no doubt helped to bring on the disease ; and 
 the natural tendency of his mind seems to have been 
 towards the gloomy regions of doubt and melancholy. 
 He at times, too, fell into excess in matters of drink ; 
 drawing, however, it would seem, not so much mirth 
 and jollity from the festive board, as moroseness and 
 passionate discontent. He was fond of society, and 
 nothing pleased him better than the converse of men 
 of real learning and intelligence. Full of wit, and 
 at times even of vivacity, himself, he relished these 
 qualities in others; but he often expressed himself 
 with too much freedom to make new friends, and too 
 little care to retain old ones. Many people admired, 
 but few loved him. He prided himself on always 
 
Chap. XII. NICHOLAS SAUNDERSON. 179 
 
 speaking the truth, on all occasions, to all he met ; a 
 noble ground of satisfaction. But he forgot that it is 
 not always necessary to speak. Silence is sometimes 
 golden, especially when he who breaks it is given to 
 sarcasm. 
 
 A man indulging in such habits, and of such a tem- 
 perament, is not likely to make the most of what 
 little sunshine befalls him, but rather to look at the 
 gloomy side of the hedge, and to take the gloomier 
 path ; and this Saunderson seems to have done. What 
 his death-bed was like has been seen at a previous 
 page, and there is little doubt that the picture is, on 
 the whole, a true one. Sunsets of this kind follow 
 but one kind of day. 
 
 Had Saunderson married, when young, such a wife 
 as her whose heart was won by Francis Huber, he 
 might have been a wiser, happier man, and a truer 
 Christian. He needed the loving affection of a genial 
 woman to mould and soften him into sunshine and 
 good humour with himself, and to living trust in 
 God. He would then have learned to play the organ, 
 instead of a piping flute, and used his senses of touch 
 and hearing, which were of wonderful acuteness, not 
 simply to display his own dexterity, in detecting spu- 
 rious coin, or the one note in a chord that erred by 
 
 N 2 
 
180 BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XII. 
 
 one-fifth of a tone, but to find out and rejoice in the 
 ring of true metal, the golden harmonies of life, the 
 small courtesies, the trifling kindly acts and words 
 which crown and complete all human happiness, 
 and bind man to man in its enjoyment. 
 
 Saunderson had in him some of the parts which 
 make a great and a good man, but he lacked the one 
 element of love and living faith. To many an ardent, 
 eager, student he opened wide the gate of science, 
 and showed the silent, cold, domains of thought be- 
 yond. But in all that he did for others, in all his 
 labours, studies, and success, one object seems chief 
 and first, and self never to have been forgotten in the 
 greatness, or beauty, or wisdom of his achievement. 
 Almost the only record of his genius is an Algebra 
 (1740), which is now out of date and almost unknown, 
 though the writer of it occupied a chair once filled 
 by Sir Isaac Newton at one of the first Universities 
 in the world. 
 
(Jhap. XIII. BLIND PEOPLE. 181 
 
 OHAPTEE XIII. 
 
 TN conclusion, it only remains to notice one or 
 
 wo points in which, during the coming years, 
 
 it is to be hoped that science and invention will do 
 
 more for the education of the Blind than they have 
 
 yet done. 
 
 And first, as regards embossed printing. There 
 can be no reasonable doubt that the Roman letter 
 is the type best adapted for general use, on every 
 possible ground. AH we need is (1) some slight 
 modification of it, which shall enable the finger of 
 the blind boy to distinguish readily between those 
 letters which to his touch are closely alike, such as 
 E and B, Gr and ; (2) the invention of some easier 
 and cheaper plan of embossing than that now in use 
 — either, as at present, on paper, or on some similar 
 material equally ready to receive impression, far 
 cheaper, far more durable, and not liable to crack. 
 
182 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. XIII. 
 
 In the matter of writing, the blind boy needs 
 some simple modification of Hughes's 'Typograph,' 
 far less in price, and less likely to get out of order. 
 The simple embossing frame, described at a previous 
 page, will do well enough for all the ordinary pur- 
 poses of a short note; but a letter of any length 
 involves the expenditure of a large amount of time, 
 and the use of many sheets of foolscap-paper. 
 
 Thirdly, with regard to the type used in embossing 
 and in ciphering, all that is needed is that the letters 
 should be cast in one solid piece of metal, instead of 
 being formed of wood and iron, as at present ; and 
 that the figures should be made of cheap printers' 
 type-metal, instead of brass. 
 
 When these improvements have been effected, and 
 the whole of the Books of the New Testament have 
 been well printed in the Boman letter, together with 
 a score of compact, handy, volumes of History, Travel, 
 and good, healthy, Fiction — at a price within the 
 reach of the poor blind man — the educational work 
 of the English Blind Schools will be carried on, as 
 it should be, with ease and efficiency and made to 
 bear abundant and lasting fruit. 
 
 At the close of such a work as the present, some 
 readers might naturally expect to find a chronologi- 
 
Chap. XIII. THEIR WORKS AND WAYS. 183 
 
 cal list of famous blind men ; and it was the writer's 
 intention to have gratified so reasonable an expecta- 
 tion. But, after some considerable research, the 
 materials for any such list were found to be of so 
 scanty and imperfect a kind; so many periods oc- 
 curred during which apparently not a single blind 
 man of note came to the surface — and, with regard 
 to so many names, the difficulty of fixing their exact 
 date was so great — that the attempt had to be given 
 up. Nor, indeed, were these the only difficulties which 
 beset such a task. Authorities differed even as to 
 exact names, rank, profession, and birthplace ; while 
 no distinction was drawn between the sufferers who 
 were blind from birth, and those who lost their sight 
 in after years of youth, or manhood. 
 
 Again, in all lists such famous celebrities as Milton 
 and Homer appear simply as blind men, and are con- 
 stantly thus cited as two of the greatest poets the world 
 has ever seen. Milton's case has been already disposed 
 of as on a par with that of Professor Fawcett ; and to 
 these may be added the name of Mr. Gale, the famous 
 inventor of the non-inflammable gunpowder. He is 
 probably one of our shrewdest men of science, and a 
 first-rate analytical chemist ; but, in no sense, to be 
 counted as a blind man. He has, we believe, lost his 
 
184 „ I3LIND PEOPLE — Chap. XIII. 
 
 sight but for a few years ; he laid up all his wonder- 
 ful store of knowledge, and acquired all his skill as a 
 manipulator, when he had the full use of a pair of 
 keen eyes ; and, having once achieved this position, 
 he was not to be driven from it by mere loss of sight. 
 Facts like these redound to the infinite credit of 
 such men as Messrs. Fawcett, Gale, and Prescott ; but 
 they prove that neither of them can justly be cited 
 as a blind man who has won his laurels under " the 
 cloud of ever-during dark." 
 
 As to Homer, the ground for believing that he was 
 a blind man at all crumbles into dust at the very 
 first touch. The wonderful beauty and distinctive- 
 ness of the Homeric descriptions leads Cicero, in a 
 noble passage of the ' Tusculan Questions,' to con- 
 tend that he, who though blind could so represent 
 every object as to enable us to see what he himself 
 could not see, must have derived great pleasure and 
 enjoyment from his inward sight. This is all true 
 enough, as far as it goes ; but there is far more truth 
 and more point in the idea that a man who could 
 thus describe the natural beauties of land and sea, of 
 cloud and sunshine, forest, hill, and plain, must him- 
 self have seen what his words describe with such 
 living force and beauty. " There is," says a keen 
 
Chap. XIII. THEIR WORKS AND WATS. 185 
 
 critic,* " far more reason in witty old Velleius, who 
 asserts that, if any one supposes Homer to hay© been 
 born blind, he must himself be destitute of every 
 sense. For never was a fable more repugnant to 
 truth than that of Homer's blindness. It originated, 
 probably, in the identification of the author of the 
 ' Iliad ' with the author of the ' Hymn to Apollo,' 
 and was then fostered by the notion that Homer 
 designed to represent himself under the character 
 of Demodocus in the . ' Odyssey.' " Milton, indeed, 
 has made a fine use of Homer's blindness j but, 
 looking at it as a fact, one might as reasonably 
 believe that the sun is blind, as that Homer's eyes 
 Were closed against all the vivid scenes of joy, 
 beauty, horror, peace, wonder, or misery, with which 
 his poems abound. Out of a hundred epithets which 
 might be chosen to prove this, the few that relate to 
 morning alone are more tban sufficient to show that 
 he must have seen all the glorious beauty of a sum- 
 mer-dawn thousands of times, ere he could have 
 coined such choice and glowing words as rjpiyiveia, 
 K/30K07re7r\o9, and po&o$d,KTv\o<; (sprung from the 
 dawn, saffron-robed, and rosy-fingered) ; " out of 
 
 * Hare's ' Guesses at Truth,' p. 41. 
 
186 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. XIII. 
 
 which," says the same writer, " have sprung nearly 
 all the poetical descriptions of Morning ever since 
 Homer's day." And, turn where you will throughout 
 his wondrous poem, it is to the eye that he con- 
 stantly appeals for his highest and noblest similes. 
 Thus Achilles, when Briseis is taken from him, sits 
 apart by himself, gazing on the dark gloom, the 
 purple, of the distant sea, while it dashed and foamed 
 at his feet. A bright blue sea would have been 
 utterly out of keeping.* So, when Apollo comes 
 down from Olympus, in anger, to avenge his insulted 
 priest, he comes vvicrl iouubs, like the night; and 
 when divine Thetis rises from the sea to listen to 
 her son's complaint, she rises yvT o/w^Xij, as a silvery 
 cloud. And in both these latter similes, Homer is 
 wonderfully superior to two of onr greatest modern 
 poets, who, with far less felicity, have used both his 
 images. Thus Milton, speaking of Pandemonium, 
 says it 
 
 " Eose like an exhalation from the earth." 
 
 while Coleridge, in his ' Ancient Mariner,' tells us 
 that he passed 
 
 " Like night from land to land." 
 * Hare, p. 40. 
 
Chap. XJII. THEIE WOEKS AND WAYS. 187 
 
 Had Homer never written, both these applications 
 might hare done more than pass muster ; but, when 
 traced to their birthplace in the ' Iliad,' they shine 
 out with redoubled grandeur, fitness, simplicity, and 
 grace. In the « Ancient Mariner ' there is a weird, 
 mysterious power of wandering, restlessly, from land 
 to land, but neither might nor terror; while in 
 Phoebus Apollo there are both. He comes swiftly 
 down from the tops of Olympus, with all the silent 
 power and majesty and terror of Night, a silence 
 unbroken but by the clang of his silver arrows. And 
 when the Goddess rises from the silver sea, she rises 
 with all the soft, shadowy dimness of an exhalation 
 which far better becomes her than the appearance 
 of the hard, stiff, outline of a grand and massive 
 temple. 
 
 From any list of famous blind men, therefore, we 
 take Homer to be excluded ; and assign to him his 
 high place of supreme renown among the immortals 
 as a poet, but not as 
 
 " The blind old man of Seio's rooky isle.". 
 
 We have already, .in many previous pages, glanced 
 at the numerous deprivations under which the blind 
 man labours, and the many objects and sources of 
 
188 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. XIII. 
 
 joy and beauty from which he is thus cut off. But 
 some of these deprivations may be, in a great mea- 
 sure, modified; and the question has often been 
 debated whether the blind man or the deaf-mute 
 is really in the more afflicted condition. At first 
 sight, the natural impulse would lead one to suppose 
 that the condition of the blind man is by far the 
 more deplorable of the two ; that his isolation from 
 the rest of the world is more complete, and his posi- 
 tive privation more severe. But, no one who has 
 ever really known an educated blind man in society 
 will again incline to any such opinion. There are 
 few persons, in whose circle of acquaintance one or 
 two such men are not to be found ; and among them 
 some of .decided talents and considerable acquire- 
 ment in literature or science. But, if we turn to, 
 the ranks of the deaf-mute, no such men of acquire- 
 ment can be found. In fact, not a single name of 
 note is to be found in the annals either of the past 
 or of the present time. It is true that the deaf- 
 mute can see all that is going on about him ; but, in 
 a very large portion of what is going on, he can take 
 only a most imperfect part, if any share at all. 
 From the whole world of sweet sound he is utterly 
 barred out for ever ; while the divine gift of speech, 
 
Chap. XIII. THEIE WOEKS AND WAYS. 189 
 
 which distinguishes man from all other and inferior 
 creatures, is entirely denied to him. He can commu- 
 nicate with friend, relative, or companion only by 
 imperfect signs and gesticulations, and the pleasant 
 words of social converse are to him totally unknown. 
 It is true that he may learn to write, or even to 
 decipher the names of letters and the construction of 
 words, but his range of acquaintance with them 
 must be narrow, and his knowledge of them clearly 
 imperfect. No strain of music can soothe his 
 troubled heart, no familiar voice can greet his 
 weary ear. In the midst of thousands, he may be 
 as utterly alone as if in the most distant solitude ; 
 and, whatever he may learn to do with his hands, 
 the higher powers of his mind will not only fail of 
 their full use, but be left unroused, unconscious, and 
 half-dead, because of his fatal deficiency in the want 
 of speech. 
 
 But, with the blind man the whole case is totally 
 different. Having the free gift of speech, and being 
 able to some extent to read the words of other men, 
 and without restraint to hear read — and to gain full 
 knowledge of — all that the greatest, wisest, and best 
 of men have ever written, he enters into the society 
 of his fellow-men as fully and freely as if gifted with 
 
190 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. XIII. 
 
 the keenest vision. Nothing delights him so much 
 as a good chat, a lively discussion, or a sharp tourna- 
 ment of contending critics. The .whole world of 
 sound is open to him, with all its special speaking, 
 joy, and beauty ; and even the highest domain of all, 
 the silver paradise of Music itself opens to him her 
 fairy gates, a new guide takes him by the hand, and 
 under her glowing, joyous sway he travels swiftly to 
 the lands where Faith is even greater than sight. 
 Under her happy guidance we must now be content 
 to leave him. 
 
 A single passage from the words of a famous blind 
 man,* who lost his sight when about twenty years of 
 age, strongly corroborates the truth of the previous 
 remarks. " I can," says Holman, " still enjoy society 
 and take a part in every ordinary occupation of life, 
 with as much facility and pleasure as previous to my 
 calamity, with the exception, perhaps, of reading, or 
 going about by myself in a strange place. It may 
 be supposed that I sustain a great disadvantage in 
 not being able to observe the countenances of those 
 with whom I converse ; but this is by no means so 
 important to me as persons are apt to imagine, for 
 
 * Holman, the blind traveller. 
 
Chap. XIII. THEIB WOEKS AND WATS. 191 
 
 the tone of voice, the manner, and my own imagina- 
 tion combine to compensate for the deficiency. And, 
 above all; we have the universal sympathy and kind- 
 ness of the rest of the world. With the deaf and dumb 
 the case is reversed, not from the intentional neglect 
 of the world, but because it is so difficult to entertain 
 them without wholly concentrating general attention, 
 a consideration which is of itself sufficient to deter 
 most persons from the attempt. Hence the deaf, 
 being involuntarily shunned, learn to look on society 
 with invidious eyes; the mirthful they regard as 
 satirists, the grave as detractors, and all the world 
 as estranged from them." 
 
 It must be added that Holman, after he became 
 blind, visited almost every part of the known world, 
 and has written a very intelligent, though lengthy, 
 
 account of his travels. 
 
 Holman, however, it must also be remembered, did 
 not lose his sight until he had reached early manhood, 
 and had seen service as a Lieiitenant in the Navy. 
 His whole after career is very remarkable and very 
 interesting ; but it must not be taken as that of a man 
 born blind. His activity, his curiosity, his daring 
 courage, and his determination to be a traveller, 
 were all doubtless firmly established in him long 
 
192 BLIND PEOPLE— Chap. XIII. 
 
 before he lost the use of a pair of good eyes ; and 
 blindness was not the cloud deep enough (deep as it 
 is) to blot out all his earlier pursuits and passions. 
 His life cannot be counted among those of famous 
 blind men, though a well-written sketch of him and 
 a summary of his travels would make a very pleasant 
 and readable volume. 
 
 But, however well Holman may have managed as 
 far as the outward passage through life is concerned, 
 and whatever may have been the achievements of 
 other famous blind men in the world of science, 
 nature, or musical art, — it is still to be remembered, 
 in spite of all that can be done for them, that the 
 great majority of the Blind do, more or less, dwell 
 in a separate and peculiar domain of their own. 
 However we may try to lessen the sharpness of -the 
 line which divides them from the seeing world, still 
 they are divided, and, at certain times, stand as it 
 were aloof from the multitude, of seeing men. As 
 we have seen in previous pages, they are utterly 
 barred off from a thousand channels through which 
 intelligence from the outer world speaks with silent 
 yet living voice to the whole human race. It is im- 
 possible to measure what their loss in this respect is, 
 or how sharp the privation ; all the greater, all the 
 
Chap. XIII. THEIR "WORKS AND WAYS. 193 
 
 Sharper, even as they are Unconscious of it. When 
 all has been done that can be done for their relief, 
 guidance, and support, the cloud under which they 
 still live is deep and dark. However bright the 
 lining of that cloud,— and no one learns to be more 
 fully conscious of its beauty and brightness than the 
 sufferer himself, — there must be, and there are, 
 times when the darkness grows deep and heavy, and 
 hard to be borne. There are times when the blind 
 man is specially conscious of his isolation. He is apt 
 to grow more and more lonely in his joy or sorrow, 
 toil of body, or toil of mind ; he dwells more and 
 more on his own peculiar condition, his own special 
 state — in a word, on himself — as if he were the centre 
 of his own little circle, and born for himself alone. 
 A worse condition, than this it is hard to imagine ; 
 mind and spirit will be fed, and fed they are on the 
 poorest, weakest, and worst of diet. Doubts, fears, 
 and suspicions spring up wholesale, growing swiftly 
 as all weeds grow, and bearing a, bitter and abund- 
 ant crop. At first they will reach, perhaps, only to 
 the household or society about him ; but by degrees 
 the leaven will spread and poison the whole air and 
 atmosphere between him and God; and doubting, 
 which at first touched only the things of time and 
 
 o 
 
194 BLIND PEOPLE — Chap. XIII. 
 
 sense, will at last undermine the things unseen and 
 eternal. Hence will spring coldness, indifference, 
 deadness, apathy in all matters that relate to the life 
 and joy and peace of thesoul ; in a word, to his truest 
 and most lasting welfare. 
 
 This is, of course, the danger which specially besets 
 the blind child who, in early youth, is often in danger 
 of being cared for only by excessive and unchecked 
 indulgence. By degrees, pity for his sad condition 
 swallows up all other feelings : and he is too often left 
 to think, say, and do just what he likes, or to be left 
 altogether unnoticed~and unchecked, simply because 
 he is blind. No kind of treatment can be worse 
 than this, both for the welfare of the unhappy being 
 himself, and for the peace and comfort of all about 
 him. It is impossible to begin too early with a Blind 
 child to teach and to show him that he is not alone 
 in the darkness. Never too early to lead him to 
 believe that the same living and mighty Being who 
 has made, and still controls, and will judge the rest 
 of the world, — is the very same that, unseen, is about, 
 and keeps, and will judge Mm at the last ; that there 
 is but one Father of us all in the Heaven above, and 
 that by Him and to Him all alike must live and die. 
 
 And no one, be it observed, is more ready and 
 
Chap. XIII. THEIR WORKS AND "WAYS. 195 
 
 more willing to learn to believe this than the blind 
 boy, if he fall into the hands of a kindly and loving 
 teacher. "No certainty," as Huber said, "is more 
 sure than the certainty of a blind man ; " no faith 
 more ready to take root if the ground be prepared, 
 more steadfast when once convinced, more capable of 
 bearing goodly fruit when it has taken root, and 
 drunk in life from the air and sunshine and moisture 
 about it in the world of seeing men. If the darkness 
 about is deep and dark, the light once kindled within 
 him will, in proportion, be bright and enduring ; and 
 the fruit gathered on the tree of faith be ripe and 
 . goodly. And, once saved from the darkness, once 
 shown and taught how the battle of life is to be 
 fought bravely and happily, and its true work done 
 even by Mm, no one can be more truly grateful than 
 the blind scholar — as I know well by frequent, posi- 
 tive, and happy experience. Never, therefore, is 
 honest toil more urgently needed, or more heartily 
 repaid. 
 
 With a single line of earnest caution I close these 
 final words to all parents of blind children. Begin, as 
 early as possible, the great lesson of life. Whatever 
 their loss, privation or suffering, they have a definite 
 place in life to take. At once, find for them some work 
 
196 . BLIND PEOPLE. Chap. XIII.. 
 
 of body, mind, and spirit.' Keep all their powers 
 healthily, heartily, and happily employed. Breathe 
 the sunshine of goodwill, and happy toil, and honest 
 pleasure into them with their early childhood. This 
 will be the best, antidote to all idle doubts and sus- 
 picions ; the best cure for selfishness ; and most 
 clearly help them to find their happy way to living 
 trust in, and unwayering love for, Him to whom all 
 must account at last. This is, in fact, the work 
 which God himself will complete and crown with 
 His choicest blessing. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 i*kinted by w. clowks and sons, stamfobd street, 
 and ohabing cuoss.