up." Adjoining Brunswick Square on the west is Great Coram Street, where (at No. 13), Thackeray lived when first married, and wrote his _Paris Sketch Book_. This district has been altered lately by tall ugly workmen's flats; but Great and Little Coram Street still perpetuate the memory of old Captain Thomas Coram, the benevolent sea captain, and originator of the well-known Foundling Hospital close by in Guilford Street. This picturesque and important institution is a kind of show place on Sundays, to which many visitors are taken. The chapel services, with the raised tiers of boys and girls singing in trained choir on each side of the big organ presented by Handel, not only please alike the eye and ear, but have the indescribable charm of pathos. As Mrs. Meagles in Dickens's novel (_Little Dorrit_) well expresses it: "Oh dear, dear" (she sobbed), "when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never through its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice, even her name!" Blake's poem pictures the scene: "Oh, what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town! Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own; The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, Hundreds of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands." In the early days of the hospital, first established in Hatton Garden in 1740, the admission of unwanted children was more or less indiscriminate, and the mortality among them--packed for transit from the country in some cases "five infants in a basket"--enormous. Now it is only a "foundling" hospital in that it receives illegitimate children, who must not be more than a year old, and whose mothers must personally apply and state their case. The "tokens" left with the babies in the early days of the institution as means of future identification, are preserved in the hospital. Some of them are very curious: "Coins of an ancient date ... a playing card--the ace of hearts--with a dolorous piece of verse written upon it; a ring with two hearts in garnets, broken in half, and then tied together; three or four padlocks, intended, we suppose, as emblems of security; a nut, an ivory fish, an anchor, a gold locket, a lottery ticket. Sometimes a piece of brass, either in the shape of a heart or a crescent moon, was used as a distinguishing mark, generally engraved with some little verse or legend. Thus one has these words upon it, 'In amore hæc sunt vitia'; another has this bit of doggerel:-- "You have my heart; Though we must part."