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Foundling   Listen
noun
Foundling  n.  A deserted or exposed infant; a child found without a parent or owner.
Foundling hospital, a hospital for foundlings.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Foundling" Quotes from Famous Books



... assure you that your revelations, whatever they are, will utterly fail to move me. Though you should declare yourself to be the daughter of a thief, a costermonger, or a chimpanzee monkey— though you should profess yourself to have been a charwoman, a foundling, a Billingsgate fish-woman, or a female mountebank—my feelings and resolves will remain the same. Sufficient for me to know that you are you, and that you are mine!—There, ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne

... you better than my ease and Horace loves you better than his foundling hospital," ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... 65, ll. 1086-1109.]—This joyous Chorus strikes a curious note. Of course it forms a good contrast with what succeeds, but how can the Elders take such a serenely happy view of the discovery that Oedipus is a foundling just after they have been alarmed at the exit of Jocasta? It seems as if the last triumphant speech of Oedipus, "fey" and almost touched with megalomania as it was, had carried the feeling ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles

... is the twentieth day, to-day, that you have been ill and like to die—in these three weeks they have not come once to ask for news of you? That's a trifle too strong, that is!... Why, in your place, I would leave all I had to the Foundling Hospital sooner than give ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... our next station. It is, as its name signifies, an institution with a benevolent purpose, an orphan asylum and foundling hospital in one. The State here charitably considers that infants who are abandoned by their parents are as much orphaned as they can become by the interposition of death,—nay, more. The death of parents oftenest leaves a child with some friend or relative; but the foundling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... The little foundling was brought up with Mr. Gordon's own daughters, and when she had attained to womanhood, by an inexplicable coincidence, a storm similar to that just mentioned occurred. An alarm-gun was fired, and this time Mr. Gordon ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... a foundling was left upon a doorstep and parentage could not be traced, he was given the name of some color. Some of the most illustrious and ancient Italian families of ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... holds his boy. Lockwin did not adopt the boy for money! The boy was not a step on the way to Congress! Lockwin did not become a popular idol because he became a father to the foundling! ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern

... he tells us stories of his experiences in the College of the Holy Saviour in which he has been in active service since its foundation. One of these is the wonderful history of the small Irish lad, Willy Brown, the son of a sea captain, and his friend, the Chinese foundling, Joseph. We shall tell the tale just as Brother Onufrio would tell it, beginning with the day in the first year of his residence in Hongkong when the crosses were placed on the spires of the dome ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman

... the foundling for surname the name of the parish, and from the Temple Church came no fewer than one hundred and four foundlings named "Temple," between 1728 and 1755. These Temples are the plebeian gens of the patrician house which claims descent ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... am serious. I know your secret. You sailed to Britain, tore the princess priestess from her island home, sailed across the seas to Sidon; there deserted wife and child. The mother died, the daughter lived—became a foundling, then a slave, Saronia! Afterwards thou didst take to wife the ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short

... a foundling, apprenticed to Dr Gray. He discovers that he is the son of General Witherington, and goes to India, where he assumes the character of Sadoc, a black slave in the service of Mde. Montreville. He delivers Menie Gray by treachery to Tippoo Saib, and Hyder Ali gives ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... thin "debtor's claret." I tossed long that night on the hard cot, listening to the scurrying rats among the roof-timbers. They ran like the thoughts in my brain. And before I slept I prayed again and again that God would put it in my power to reward him whom charity for a friendless foundling had brought to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... approached, gazed into her eyes with a twinkling smile of mirth, that gradually changed to one of fondness and pity; and kissing her respectfully, he added in a soft tone: "Come, come, how is the maid Amanda, how fares our charming foundling?" ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... Wassermann's predilection for these matters that in his novel Kasper Hauser or Sluggishness of Heart (1909) he seeks to interpret anew and on the basis of scrupulous attention to all the documents in the case the oft-treated story of the mysterious foundling who came to light in Nuremberg in 1828 and who was supposed to be a cast-off prince of Baden. Moreover, of the three narratives in the volume entitled The Sisters (1906), two are fantastically constructed criminal cases which endeavor suggestively to explain the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... offered him at auction-sales, and been ourselves knocked down; we have decoyed him into strange places and abandoned him, until we are poor from the payment of unpromised rewards. In the character of a charitable donation he has been driven from the door of every orphan asylum, foundling hospital, and reform school in the State. Not a week passes but we forfeit exemplary damages for inciting him to fall foul of passing gentlemen, in the vain hope of ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... Nat's motor horn included, as a last concession, and because he had hitherto forborne to play on it); and in the second, the five Fulmers, the bonne, who at the eleventh hour had refused to be left, a cage-full of canaries, and a foundling kitten who had murderous designs on them; all of which had to be taken because, if the bonne came, there would be nobody left ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... to be better than those who had no such advantages? Better have been a foundling picked up off the city commons than with such magnificent inheritance of consecration ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... moved to self-glorification than would have become a servant of the Church. He himself had no knowledge even of his own near parentage; he had been a forsaken child, left one dark autumn night in the iron cradle of the gates of a foundling hospital in Reggio Calabrese. His names had been bestowed on him by the chaplain of the institution; and his education had been given him by an old nobleman of the town, attracted by his appearance and intelligence as a child. ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... would not judge me harshly. If only you could know what I have fought up from, a foundling without a name abandoned in a third-rate Parisian hotel, reared a scullion, butt and scapegoat, with associates only of the lowest, scullions, beggars, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... that the project conceived in the obscure dreams of an out-at-elbows young man, and born a foundling upon his money, should have been adopted at sight as the spoiled darling of fashion's ultra-fashionable. Undoubtedly, astute Mr. Dayne had had somewhat to do with this, he who so well understood the connection between social ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... the sixth century; he was a foundling, discovered in his infancy lying in a coracle, on a salmon-weir, in the domain of Elphin, a prince of North Wales, who became his patron. During his life he arrogated to himself a supernatural descent and understanding, and for at least a thousand years after his death he was regarded ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... Helene' at Bucarest, although it is nominally a foundling institution, really presents many educational advantages which are only to be found in the ladies' colleges of England and the United States. A large proportion of the scholars are foundlings or orphans; but many pay for their instruction, and some of the girls are the daughters of ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... famous practical joke. A certain medical professor was wont to lecture in bed. One night he left town unexpectedly. Lever, by chance, came early to lecture, found the Professor absent, slipped into his bed, put on his nightcap, and took the class himself. On another day he was standing outside the Foundling Hospital with a friend, a small man. Now, a kind of stone cradle for foundlings was built outside the door, and, when a baby was placed therein, a bell rang. Lever lifted up his friend, popped him into the cradle, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... was my father; I was six years old when I lost my mother, who had taken me from the Foundling Hospital, where she had been compelled at first to place me. The kind people of whom I have spoken lived in our house; they had no children, and seeing me an ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... generally the sufferers, though I sometimes see the slate-colored snowbird unconsciously duped in like manner; and the other day, in a tall tree in the woods, I discovered the black-throated green-backed warbler devoting itself to this dusky, over-grown foundling. An old farmer to whom I pointed out the fact was much surprised that such things should happen in his woods ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... blushed under her sunburned skin. "I came from the Foundling Hospital," she said, briefly. Then, with an awkward courtesy, she passed limping into the house, and the Captain heard, as she went away on the pavement of the court, the hard sound of the little ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... was a tender scold. She was almost a foundling, but a believer in heredity could trace in her the evidences of good blood. From some old mansion, long years in ruin, a grace had escaped and come to her. An Englishman, traveling homeward from the defunct colony of Rugby, declared that she was ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read

... opening of that scene they speak of the waterfall and listen to it, nobody thought of its mysterious music. I could make it, with a good stage carpenter, in an hour. Is it not a curious thing that they want to make me a governor of the Foundling Hospital, because, since the Christmas number, they have had such an amazing access ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... demur about receiving Will's little foundling of the hut-circle. His heart's desire was usually her amibition also, and though Timothy, as the child had been called, could boast no mother's love, yet Phoebe proved a kind nurse, and only abated her attention upon the arrival of her own daughter. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... smiled upon the world, and upon which the world was then smiling back—was it a son domiciled in its father's house and fully in patria potestate? or a ward in the guardianship of its chief promoters? or an orphan foundling, to be boarded out on the scattered-home system at the public expense, and to be brought up to be useful to the community at large? A vexed question of paternity; and the worst of it was, there was no international court competent to ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... It's exactly what Mis' Calvert said her own self. 'Twas why she wouldn't bother raisin' you herself after your Pa and Ma died and sent you to her. So she turned you into a foundling orphan and your Father John and Mother Martha brung you up. Then your old Aunt Betty got acquainted with you an' liked you, and sort of hankered to get you back again out of the folkses' hands what had took all the trouble of ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond

... but the projects of the preceding king were carried out, and more than eighty new streets were opened. The planting of trees in the Champs Elysees, also took place under the reign of Louis XIV. The palace of the Tuileries was enlarged, the Hotel des Invalides, a foundling hospital, ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... men protect women and children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon whose darkness has dawned the star of ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... university, what was he doing? Polluting himself with a gay and dissipated secret life in the company of other fast bloods, multimillionaires in money and paupers in character. When she was building her first foundling asylum, what was he doing? Alas! When she was projecting her noble Society for the Purifying of the Sex, what was he doing? Ah, what, indeed! When she and the W. C. T. U. and the Woman with the Hatchet, moving with resistless march, were sweeping ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... victim of a heartless man and a cruel law. She tied to her baby's wrist a paper on which she had written its father's name, placed it in the rota at the Foundling of Santo Spirito, and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... you might as well send to the foundling hospital and borrow a baby as to borrow a book with the idea of its being any great satisfaction. We like a baby in our cradle, but prefer that one which belongs to the household. We like a book, but want to feel it is ours. We never yet got any advantage from a borrowed book. We hope ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... hamlet of Saint-Pierre in quest of information respecting the lad who was supposed to be in apprenticeship with Montoir the wheelwright. She had talked too much, said too much, particularly to the other apprentice, that Richard, another foundling, and one of such bad instincts, too, that seven months later he had taken flight, like Alexandre, after purloining some money from his master. Then years elapsed, and all trace of them was lost. But later on, most assuredly they had met one another on the Paris pavement, in such ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... the females of Great Britain are now conjured to perform. St. Vincent de Paule, aumonier general des galeres, to whom France owes the chief of its humane establishments, instituted amongst the rest, the Foundling Hospital of Paris. His fund for its endowment failing, after repeated remonstrances for further general alms, which though not unsuccessful, proved insufficient, he gathered together a congregation of females, before ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney

... been brought up a foundling in the house of the old chief and was fond of him. Tse-tse, who had heard and said more than became a young man, was both angry and frightened; ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al

... domestic; how I drank toasts in the beer, and stated on interrogatory that I was a married man and the father of two blessed infants; how the ladies marveled thereat; how one of the ladies, having been in London, inquired where I lived, and, being told, remembered that Doughty Street and the Foundling Hospital were in the Old Kent Road, which I didn't contradict,—all this and a great deal more must make us laugh when I return, as it makes me laugh now to think of. Of my subsequent visit to the upholsterer recommended by the landlady; of the absence of the upholsterer's wife, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... come to me,' and go on talking. Presently, perhaps some minutes later, the idea we are in search of comes all at once into the mind, delivered like a prepaid bundle, laid at the door of consciousness like a foundling in a basket. How it came there we know not. The mind must have been at work groping and feeling for it in the dark; it cannot have come of itself. Yet all the while, our consciousness was busy with ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... ever met. Both are now dead, but I remember Sam to have been for many years engaged in teaching the sword exercise in some of the leading schools in and about Dublin. He ultimately gave this up, however, having been appointed to some comfortable situation in the then Foundling Hospital, where his Beck died, and he, poor fellow, did not, I have heard, long ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... pleasant new Fancie of a Foundling's Device intitled and cald the Nurcerie of Names, with wood borders, b.l. 4to. ib. impr. by Rich. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... soon find its way to the garret; if good, as a work of art, it will perpetuate the fame, probably the name, indeed, of the artist alone. These are the obscurorum virorum imagines which, as Walpole said, "are christened commonly in galleries, like children at the Foundling Hospital, by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various

... sit in a cozy home, surrounded by safeguards and comforts, can have no idea of the blind foundling's utter dependence or the terrible meaning conveyed by ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... described; the little one in triple measure imitating the tap of his hammer, and fiercely mocked in the savage laugh of Alberic at his death; and finally the crooning tune in which he details all his motherly kindnesses to the little foundling Siegfried. Besides this there are all manner of little musical blinkings and shamblings and whinings, the least hint of which from the orchestra at any moment instantly brings Mimmy to mind, whether he is on the stage at the ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... had conceived a notion of some rather peevish foundling of the Ritz-Carlton lobbies and Central Park riding academies, was agreeably amazed by the sweet ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... to her, and, I will venture to add, in justice to myself. I felt the sincerest sympathy for her position. She was without father, mother, or friends, one of the poor forsaken children whom the mercy of the foundling hospital provides with a home. Her after life on the stage was the life of a virtuous woman, persecuted by profligates, insulted by some of the baser creatures associated with her, to whom she was an object ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various

... exactly dislike the girl, though she did not hold with the way Bunting's daughter was being managed by that old aunt of hers—an idle, good-for-nothing way, very different from the fashion in which she herself had been trained at the Foundling, for Mrs. Bunting as a little child had known no other home, no other family than those ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... house of some confidential friend; she said that was impossible, as her father would not suffer her to be absent from him a single day. Some of the servants were, therefore, let into the secret, and the doctor made his arrangement with the treasurer of the Foundling Hospital for the reception of the child, for which he was to pay 190l.—The lady was desired to weigh well if she could bear pain without alarming the family by her cries; she said "Yes,"—and she kept her word. At the usual period she was delivered, not of one child ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various

... divided and partial notions had flitted across his mind too rapidly to stir such passion as moved him now; even the hint of her sin and danger had been heard heedlessly, if heard at all. It was the word itself which bore its own message, its own spell to the heart of the fatherless and motherless foundling, as he faced for the first time the deep, everlasting, divine reality of kindred.... A sister! of his own flesh and blood—born of the same father, the same mother—his, his, for ever! How hollow and fleeting seemed all 'spiritual sonships,' 'spiritual daughterhoods,' inventions of the changing ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... does it make how you christen a foundling? These are not my legitimate scientific offspring, and you may consider them ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... street of the stocking-makers), running away from the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria. The fascinatingly pretty building at the corner, opposite Pisano's Baptistery doors, is the Bigallo, in the loggia of which foundling children used to be displayed in the hope that passers-by might pity them sufficiently to make them presents or even adopt them; but this custom continues no longer. The Bigallo was designed, it is thought, by Orcagna, and it ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... sky sheds the snow-flake down, The snow-flake is her banner's star, Her stripes the boreal streamers are. Long she loved the Northman well; Now the iron age is done, She will not refuse to dwell With the offspring of the Sun Foundling of the desert far, Where palms plume and siroccos blaze, He roves unhurt the burning ways In climates of the summer star. He has avenues to God Hid from men of northern brain, Far beholding, without cloud, What these with slowest steps attain. If once the generous chief arrive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... had been able to dance. At each moment her beauty became more revealed, and her expressive eyes appealed more directly to the heart than the songs of the slaves. Every one was enchanted, especially the prince, who called her his little foundling; and she danced again quite readily, to please him, though each time her foot touched the floor it seemed as if she trod on ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... turned toward him a face grave and thoughtful. A certain portion of the old morbidness returned to her. "It's not kind of you, Colonel Cal," said she, "to remind me that I'm nobody. I'm worse than an orphan. I'm worse than a foundling. How I endure staying here is more than I can tell. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... route for Liverpool, Mr. Staff found plenty of time to consider the affair of the foundling bandbox in every aspect with which a lively imagination could invest it; but to small profit. In fact, he was able to think of little else, with the damned thing smirking impishly at him from its perch on the opposite seat. He was vexed to exasperation by the consciousness that he couldn't ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... came home with a wonderful tale of a foundling with big eyes," he said when, he had greeted everybody, "and I thought I'd better come over and have a look at her. I should judge she'd need pretty close watching for a ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith

... whom she taught at the Rhinelander Academy, bound for a summer's outing in—to her and them—unknown lands. Also, as there may be some who have not hitherto followed the fortunes of Dorothy, it may be well to explain that she was a foundling, left upon the doorstep of a man and wife, in a quiet street in Baltimore. That he had lost his health and his position as a letter-carrier in that city and had removed to his wife's small farm in the Hudson Highlands. That ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond

... the places where Christ was conversant on earth; in which journey he made Rochester his way, where, after he had rested two or three days, he departed towards Canterbury. But ere he had gone far from the city, his servant—a foundling who had been brought up by him out of charity—led him of purpose out of the highway and spoiled him both of his money and his life. The servant escaped, but his master, because he died in so holy a purpose of mind, was by the ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... Foundling Estate Hammersmith Bridge St Andrew's, Holborn Jermyn Street Old Bailey Piccadilly Newgate Street, eastern end Southampton Street Lombard Street Oxford ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... careful examination of the mortuary tables of London, Paris, New York, Dublin, Moscow, and other cities, will show that infanticide is far more common than supposed. It is a crime easily hidden and hard to trace. Take the foundling hospitals as a guide to some approximate estimate of the amount of infanticide in France. We find that she has upwards of 360 hospitals; that in Paris alone, in five years, from 1819 to 1823, 25,277 children were received, of whom eleven thirteenths died, and that the annual number ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... together of the child and the race; Rousseau, who told of childhood as "refuge from present evil, a mournful reminiscence of a lost Paradise, who (like St. Pierre) preached a return to nature, and left his own offspring to the tender mercy of a foundling asylum"; Luther, the great religious reformer, who was ever "a father among his children"; Goethe, who represents German intellectualism, yet a great child-artist; Froebel, the patron saint of the kindergarten; Hans Andersen, the "inventor" of fairy-tales, and the transformer ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... in a foundling asylum. Here's a pass. Go up now and see it. If you hurry you'll get there just in time for that act. Then if you come to me at the office in the morning at ten, I'll give you a chance as one of the Charity girls. Do you ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson

... to collect his wits, and as he had a warm heart and a broad mind, he stretched his hand over the roof of the carriage and said: 'Poor little waif, you shall be one of us!' And he ordered my brother Jacques to roll the foundling ahead of us. Thinking out loud, my ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... him whom thou weddest, whoever he may be," he said. "I am but a foundling, and the King's servant to boot—it would be against all rule and custom were he to wed ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... before I go any further, that there is no such christian-name as Gill, and that her confident opinion is, that the name given to me in the baptism wherein I was made, &c., was Gilbert. She is certain to be right, but I never heard of it. I was a foundling child, picked up somewhere or another, and I always understood my christian-name to be Gill. It is true that I was called Gills when employed at Snorridge Bottom betwixt Chatham and Maidstone to frighten birds; but that had nothing to do with the Baptism wherein I was ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens

... awakened in her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to herself from procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much distended with milk; till from habit she became as much delighted with this foundling as if it had been her real offspring. This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which grave historians, as well as the poets, assert of exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... though not aiming at the almost antique simplicity of the Mare au Diable, is the story of Francois le Champi, the foundling, saved from the demoralization to which lack of the softening influences of home and parental affection predestine such unhappy children, through the tenderness his forlorn condition inspires in a single heart—that of Madeline Blanchet, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... an essay on oratory. It made me grin from end to end. Yet, as on the repeating of a comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic on the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes it like a foundling hospital—sentences unparented, ideas abandoned of their proper text. "Where grief is to be expressed," says Bell, "the right hand laid slowly on the left breast, the head and chest bending forward, is a just expression of ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... with that deadness of life wherein no sympathy is bestowed, no love awakened—that I felt as one witnessing a dead man recalled to life, after all that made life pleasant had fled. What a sorrowful house that Number Nineteen was! From the desolate servant-of-all-work at her first place from the Foundling, to the half-starved German in the attics, every inmate of the house seemed to have nothing but the bitter bread of affliction to eat—nothing but the salt waters of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various

... York City; Former President Medical Board, New York Foundling Hospital; Consulting Physician, French Hospital; Attending Physician, St. John's Riverside Hospital, Yonkers; Surgeon to New Croton Aqueduct and other Public Works, to Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company of Arizona, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... tale was made public, it naturally created great excitement, and people set themselves to discover the identity of this foundling, whom the Abbe de l'Epee had named Joseph. The Abbe himself was never tired of conjecturing the possible history of his protege, or of communicating his conjectures to his friends. At length, in the year 1777, a lady, who had ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... at least, you showed it mighty plain—" she broke in, "that it was because I was a foundling and never knew who my real parents were that you have ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben

... The reviews which he held in the Kremlin were more frequent; he formed all the dismounted cavalry into battalions, and lavishly distributed rewards. The division of Claparede, the trophies and all the wounded that could be removed, set out for Mojaisk; the rest were collected in the great foundling hospital; French surgeons were placed there; and the Russian wounded, intermixed with ours, were intended to ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... effect; since to those who can be interested or affected by the marvellous and mysterious, and who love to step for amusement out of the precincts of nature, and the conduct of "the folks of the world" the Foundling of the Forest will be interesting and affecting. Viewing it with a strict critical eye, not only the plot is faulty, but the composition is in many places extremely bad. If the production of original character was the author's design, he has succeeded to his heart's ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... his eager pen, And pours his vengeance in the burning line,)— Who christen'd thus Maria's lyre-divine The idiot strum of Vanity bemus'd, And even the abuse of Poesy abus'd?— Who called her verse a Parish Workhouse, made For motley foundling Fancies, stolen or strayed? ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... poet's sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and what ought to be his glory becomes his torment; his imagination is his cruelest enemy. The injured workman, the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute who has fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged—even vice and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the world is merciless to the inventor, to the man who thinks. Here everything must show an immediate and practical result. Fruitless attempts are mocked at, though they may lead to the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... father's oil factory with the body of a foundling from my mother's studio I saw a constable who seemed to be closely watching my movements. Young as I was, I had learned that a constable's acts, of whatever apparent character, are prompted by the most reprehensible motives, and I avoided him by dodging ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... hundred dinars set under his head; and I took the gold and carried it off together with the child." But when his comrade, the true father, heard this tale from him he said to himself, "This matter must have been after such fashion," and he was certified that the foundling was his son, for that he had heard the history told by the mother of the babe with the same details essential and accidental. So he firmly believed[FN577] in these words and rejoiced thereat, when his comrade continued, "And after that, O my brother, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... own hands he carried five of his offspring to foundling asylums as they came into the world does not alter or change the fact that he was also the author of "Emile," in which book, let it be remembered, the idea of substituting natural for pedantic methods in the training and developing of the physical, mental and moral faculties of the growing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering with it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which early history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice prepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling, between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the tale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it is memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if some record of the narrative in its former guise, or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... leisure. The women had begun to care for artistic things much earlier, and they had taught their children to care for them, and the result was a general tendency of taste to a higher level. Genius may be an orphan and a foundling, but taste is the child of taste. Genius is the crude, creative force; but the gentle sense of appreciation, neither creative nor crude, but receptive, is most often acquired at home and in childhood. A full-grown man may learn to be a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... England, becomes "as mischievous a monkey as any of them"; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is merely the slanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other people's waistcoats with his tears, sent his own babies to the Foundling Hospital. The influence of the French eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was first combated and then baldly denied. The premier journalist of the age declared, with the satisfaction of a turkey-cock ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... foundling, passed through the first street, then the second, then the third. He raised his eyes, seeking in the higher stories and in the roofs a lighted window-pane; but all were closed and dark. At intervals he knocked at the doors. No one answered. Nothing makes the heart so like a stone as ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... among the children of the common people, who cannot afford to tend them with the same care as those of better station. Though their marriages are generally more fruitful than those of people of fashion, a smaller proportion of their children arrive at maturity. In foundling hospitals, and among the children brought up by parish charities, the mortality is still greater than among ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... church at the Foundling Hospital in the morning, still in ignorance of what had happened on the previous night. There he heard allusions made to the invasion, and a special prayer for peace. Coming out, he bought a Referee. He became alarmed at the news in this, and went again to Waterloo ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... demand the assertion. There are mysteries of iniquity, under the semblance of man and woman, read of in history, or met with in the unchronicled sufferings of private life, which would almost make us believe that the powers of Darkness occasionally made use of this earth for a Foundling Hospital, and sent their imps to us, already provided with a return-ticket. We shall not decide on the lawfulness or otherwise of any attempt to depict such importations; we can only rest perfectly satisfied that, granting the author's premises, it ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... already beginning to show itself. Neglected children in great towns had already excited compassion. Thomas Coram (1668?-1751) had been shocked by the sight of dying children exposed in the streets of London, and succeeded in establishing the Foundling Hospital (founded in 1742). In 1762, Jonas Hanway (1712-1786) obtained a law for boarding out children born within the bills of mortality. The demand for children's labour, produced by the factories, seemed naturally enough to offer a better chance for extending such charities. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... want a man with no relations and no schooling: that is, a man who would be out of the running altogether if he were not a strong man. And I can't find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability, he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with secondhand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... had occurred worth mention. FIRST, Captain Coram, a public-spirited half-pay gentleman in London, originator of the Foundling Hospital there, had turned his attention to the fine capabilities and questionable condition of NOVA SCOTIA, with few inhabitants, and those mostly disaffected; and, by many efforts now forgotten, had got the Government persuaded to despatch (June, 1749) a kind of Half-pay or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... this one more time to please you," he said. "But I promise you this will be the last time. You needn't ask me again. I have drunk enough milk the past three weeks to support a foundling ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... taken a house for us in Brunswick Square, next to the Foundling Hospital. He was about to start an English branch of the Vougeot-Conti firm in the City. I will not trouble the reader with any details about this enterprise, which presented many difficulties at first, and indeed rather ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... mothers, mebbe; but me and May Wistaria and Mintie Delancy—they was the girls you seen up-stairs in HER room—we never did have no fathers and mothers, we're just waifs, and so's them kids waifs too that's playing in the rocking-chair. They was all foundling-asylum kids." ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... of Scutari after one of the most strenuous and glorious campaigns of her history, and lastly Albania, poor and helpless, without any support from her creators, feels all that a weak and wretched foundling has to feel toward those responsible for its misfortunes and miseries. In contrast with these feelings, Rumania was the only Balkan State perfectly satisfied with the new arrangement. In fact, Rumania, having played in the war the part of a great ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... (in 1767) Elizabeth Brownrigge, midwife to the St. Dunstan's workhouse and wife of a house-painter, cruelly ill-used her two female apprentices. Mary Jones, one of these unfortunate children, after being often beaten, ran back to the Foundling, from whence she had been taken. On the remaining one, Mary Mitchell, the wrath of the avaricious hag now fell with redoubled severity. The poor creature was perpetually being stripped and beaten, was frequently chained up at night nearly naked, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... sooth," she said merrily, "some lover will teach you to kiss presently. Thou art growing very pretty, Rose, and when some of the gallants come over from Paris, they will esteem the foundling of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... 19th.—Proceeded to Bologna, re-enter the Papal dominions, and crossed the Appenines; views; a Normal School at Bologna, containing 1,000 pupils, and a Foundling ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... source. He settled Attica and founded Athens, named after his niece Athena, daughter of Zeus, who had no mother, but had sprung from the head of Zeus, which probably signified that her mother's name was not known—she was a foundling. Athena caused the first olive-tree to grow on the Acropolis of Athens, parent of all the olive-trees of Greece. Poseidon seems to have had settlements at Corinth, AEgina, Naxos, and Delphi. Temples were erected to his honor in nearly all the seaport towns Of Greece. He sent ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... became surprisingly enamoured of the little foundling, believing his adoption was dictated by the will of Heaven; and to this decision its father readily acceded. Sir Thomas, to give the greater sanction to this supposed miracle, as well as to remove ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... spend-thrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial flowers of some passion which the church-yard smothered while the Stuarts were yet unkinged, suggestive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... R. to the Rue d'Arcole that has swept away the old church of St. Landry, near which, until the reign of Louis XIII., a market was held for the sale of foundling children at thirty sous. The scandal was abolished by the efforts of the gentle St. Vincent de Paul, Anne of Austria's confessor. Turning L. along this street we emerge on the Parvis, which we skirt to the R. along the facade of the new Hotel Dieu, and reach the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... rupes a rumpere. Indeed, there is an analogous Sanscrit root, meaning break, crack. But though Mr. Wedgwood lets off this coughing, hawking, spitting, and otherwise unpleasant old patriarch Rac so easily in the case of the foundling Crag, he has by no means done with him. Stretched on the unfilial instrument of torture that bears his name, he is made to confess the paternity of draff, and dregs, and dross, and so many other uncleanly brats, that we feel as if he ought to be nailed by the ear to the other side ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... aside, and began to pour out a drink for himself. There was something strangely elusive about this little creature whom Fortune had flung to him. He wondered what he should do with her. Was she too old for a foundling hospital? ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... results of Tilly Slowboy's constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated, and installed in such a comfortable home. For the maternal and paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in meaning, and expresses ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens

... Paul-beyond-the-Walls and St. John Lateran at Rome. Brunelleschi not only introduced columnar arcades into a number of cloisters and palace courts, but also used them effectively as exterior features in the Loggia S.Paolo and the Foundling Hospital (Ospedale degli Innocenti) at Florence. The chief drawback in these light arcades was their inability to withstand the thrust of the vaulting over the space behind them, and the consequent recourse to iron tie-rods where vaulting was used. The Italians, however, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... her disposition. On one point all agreed; which was, that, if judged by his actions, little could be said in mitigation of the conduct of him who, while writing sentiments fraught with passion and tenderness, could consign his offspring to a foundling hospital! ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner

... have perished. For children can only be brought up in families. There is a subtle sympathy between the mother and the child which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or by 'strong nurses one or more' (Laws). If Plato's 'pen' was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or the foundling hospital of Dublin, more than nine-tenths of his children would have perished. There would have been no need to expose or put out of the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of themselves. So emphatically does nature ...
— The Republic • Plato

... was everything he should not have been. He was a failure as footman, as servant, as tutor, as secretary, as music copier, as lace maker. He wandered in Turin, Paris, Vienna, London. His immorality was notorious,—he was not faithful in love, and his children were sent to a foundling asylum. He was poverty-stricken, dishonest, discontented, and, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... tongue, who now deeply lamented the wrong she had done, but all to no purpose. Fearful of the gossip which she thought the event would occasion, she gave one of the children to a faithful handmaiden, with directions that it should be laid on the steps of a church, where it might be picked up as a foundling and nourished by some stranger. The babe was wrapped in a linen cloth, which again was covered with a beautiful piece of red silk that the lady's husband had purchased in the East, and a handsome ring engraved with ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you? Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto: NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it is out of pure ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... Bulbo, Crown Prince of Crim Tartary, found the child, and, with THAT ELEGANT BENEVOLENCE which has always distinguished the heiress of the throne of Paflagonia, gave the little outcast a SHELTER AND A HOME! Her parentage not being known, and her garb very humble, the foundling was educated in the Palace in a menial capacity, ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... days since there were about two hundred babies in the city foundling asylum to be ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... secretary to the French ambassador at Venice; he supported himself as a musician and as a private secretary; he lived from hand to mouth, having as a companion one Therese Levasseur, a grotesquely illiterate maid servant, picked up at an inn. Their five children he successively took to the Foundling, losing sight of them forever. To the mother he was faithful for the most part, although not without some ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... the literature of the eighteenth century are also to be found in the archives of Bohemia, which, amongst the glorious ones of this epoch, can cite Jean Jacques Rousseau and d'Alembert, the foundling of the porch of Notre Dame, and amongst the obscure, Malfilatre and Gilbert, two overrated reputations, for the inspiration of the one was but a faint reflection of the weak lyricism of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, and the inspiration of the ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... welcomed. After supper, for in Meadville nobody "dined," Miss Prescott and the girls sauntered out with The Wren to obtain some clothing for the waif who had so strangely come into their possession. It was odd, but somehow they none of them even suggested giving up the queer little foundling to the authorities as had originally been their intention. Instead, although none of them actually voiced it, it appeared that tacitly they had decided to keep the child ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham

... Hilton, we're bringing you two sows and ourselves to visit you!" said the farmer. "First a baby and then two sows! You'll keep a foundling home very soon." ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone

... with my foster-mother, who is very old. I call her grandmother. She took me in when I was a foundling; now I am taking care of her. She has always been good to me. And ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... wondered at that some people hold that blood relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to be ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... Handel as the great composer, but he was not so busy in this that his thoughts were not also dwelling upon other things. If ever you go to London, you should of a Sunday morning hear the service at the Foundling Hospital. You will see there many hundreds of boys and girls grouped about the organ. Their singing will seem beautiful to you, from its sweetness and from the simple faith in which it is done. After the service you may go to the many rooms of this ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper

... for years—not since Drusilla used to bring him to dances, when we were young girls. She didn't like it particularly, but she had to do it because he was her father's ward and had gone to live with them. He was uncouth—aggressive. Wasn't he a foundling, or a street Arab, or something like that? He certainly seemed so. He wasn't a bit—civilized. And once he—he said something—he almost insulted me. You wouldn't take his ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... and all such small unfortunates. She had always lived in the country, and having neither brothers nor sisters her tender heart had given its affections to the dumb creatures about her. It was fortunate for the foundling bird that it fell into her hands, as had it been left to Hoodie's affectionate cares its history would certainly have been quickly told. She was very indignant with Magdalen for the very tiny portions of bread and milk, which was all she would allow ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth



Words linked to "Foundling" :   babe, abandoned infant, foundling hospital, baby, infant



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