Thus Gloucestershire has certainly considerable eminence among English counties. To other distinguished names must be added that of Robert Raikes, who must ever be regarded as the founder of Sabbath-schools. It is not intended by this that there had never been any attempts made to gather the children on the Sabbath for some kind of religious instruction—although such attempts were very few, and a diligent search has probably brought them all [?] under our knowledge; but the example and the influence of Raikes gave to the idea the character of a movement; it stirred the whole country, from the throne itself, the King and Queen, the bishops, and the clergy; all classes of ministers and laymen became interested in what was evidently an easy and happy method of seizing upon the multitudes of lost children who in that day were “perishing for lack of knowledge.” Mr. Joseph Stratford, in his _Biographical Sketches of the Great and Good Men in Gloucestershire_, and Mr. Alfred Gregory, in his _Life of Robert Raikes_—to which works we must confess our obligation for much of the information contained in this chapter—have both done honour to the several humbler and more obscure labourers whose hearts were moved to attempt the work to which Raikes gave a national importance, and which from his hands, and from his time, became henceforth a perpetual institution in the Church work of every denomination of Christian believers and labourers. The Rev. Joseph Alleine, the author of _The Alarm to the Unconverted_, an eminent Nonconformist minister of Taunton, adopted the plan of gathering the young people together for instruction on the Lord’s day. Even in Gloucestershire, before Raikes was born, in the village of Flaxley, on the borders of the Forest of Dean—Flaxley, of which the poet Bloomfield sings: “’Mid depths of shade gay sunbeams broke Through noble Flaxley’s bowers of oak; Where many a cottage, trim and gay, Whispered delight through all the way:” in the old Cistercian Abbey, Mrs. Catharine Boevey, the lady of the abbey, had one of the earliest and pleasantest Sabbath-schools. Her monument in Flaxley Church, erected after her death in 1726, records her “clothing and feeding her indigent neighbours, and teaching their children, some of whom she entertained at her house, and examined them herself.” Six of the poor children, it is elsewhere stated, “by turns dined at her residence on Sundays, and were afterwards heard say the Catechism.”