nearest his heart,
the education of the very poor. He protested against the danger of
calling a little learning dangerous; declared his preference for the
very least of the little over none at all; proposed to substitute for
the old a new doggerel,

Though house and lands be never got,
Learning can give what they can _not_;

told his listeners of the real and paramount danger we had lately taken
Longfellow to see in the nightly refuges of London, "thousands of
immortal creatures condemned without alternative or choice to tread, not
what our great poet calls the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire,
but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance;" and
contrasted this with the unspeakable consolation and blessings that a
little knowledge had shed on men of the lowest estate and most hopeless
means, "watching the stars with Ferguson the shepherd's boy, walking the
streets with Crabbe, a poor barber here in Lancashire with Arkwright, a
tallow-chandler's son with Franklin, shoemaking with Bloomfield in his
garret, following the plough with Burns, and, high above the noise of
loom and hammer, whispering courage in the ears of workers I could this
day name in Sheffield and in Manchester."

The same spirit impelled him to give eager welcome to the remarkable
institution of Ragged schools, which, begun by a shoemaker of
Southampton and a chimney-sweep of Windsor and carried on by a peer of
the realm, has had results of incalculable importance to society. The
year of which I am writing was its first, as this in which I write is
its last; and in the interval, out of three hundred thousand children to
whom it has given some sort of education, it is computed also to have
given to a third of that number the means of honest employment.[69] "I
sent Miss Coutts," he had written (24th of September), "a sledge hammer
account of the Ragged schools; and as I saw her name for two hundred
pounds in the clergy education subscription-list, took pains to show her
that religious mysteries and difficult creeds wouldn't do for such
pupils. I told her, too, that it was of immense importance they should
be _washed_. She writes back to know what the rent of some large airy
premises would be, and what the expense of erecting a regular bathing or
purifying place; touching which points I am in correspondence with the
authorities. I have no doubt she will do whatever I ask her in the
matter. She is a most excelle