(_To Florence Nightingale._) _Dec._ 8 [1855]. It has been curious (as your representative) how our Burlington Street room has seen Manning and Maurice, Mr. Best and the Chancellor, Lady Amelia Jebb and Mrs. Herbert, Lady Byron and Lady Canning, the extremes of all kinds crowding in to help you in every way that they could devise. Then come in tradespeople, all so intent on you; and working folk, your stoutest supporters, and those you will care most for. And we are tenderly treated and affectionately welcomed by one and all of all classes and opinions for your sake, my dear, and very sweet to me is kindliness for your dear sake; it seems as if it were part of you coming to meet me.
But Miss Nightingale's popularity was not limited to such circles as those in which her family moved. Letters from soldiers in the Crimea had made her known in thousands of humble homes, and she became the heroine of the cottage, the workshop, and the alleys. Old soldiers dropped into poetry about her, and rhymed broadsheets, with rough woodcuts of the Lady with the Lamp, issued from printers in Seven Dials and Soho. One of these songs, entitled "The Nightingale in the East," and intended to go to the tune of "The Cottage and Water Mill," was especially popular with its refrain:--
So forward, my lads, may your hearts never fail, You are cheer'd by the presence of a sweet Nightingale.[181]
[181] For the text see Bibliography B, No. 7. An article in the _Quarterly Review_ of April 1867, entitled "The Nightingale in the East," is "a study of the Poetry of Seven Dials." The popular ditty about Miss Nightingale has been sung under many skies and to many audiences; never to greater effect than on Christmas Day 1870 in St. Thomas's Hospital (then in the Surrey Gardens). The nurses had arranged a Christmas treat; the children had sung hymns, and older patients had given popular songs of the day. A patient in the Accident Ward, a coal-heaver with a broken leg, then volunteered; when the words of the refrain caught the ears of the Nightingale nurses, "we dropped all work" (says one of them), "and listened intently till the song was over, all enthusiasm for our Chief." The singer told them that he was an old soldier, and had been nursed by Miss Nightingale in the General Hospital at Balaclava.
