THE MOTHER’S’ EDUCATION.

Mrs. Scott’s education, also, had been an excellent one—­giving, besides a good general grounding, an acquaintance with literature, and not neglecting “the more homely duties of the needle and the account-book.”  Her manners, moreover (an important and too often neglected factor in a mother’s influence over her children), were finished and elegant, though intolerably stiff in some respects, when compared with the manners and habits of to-day.  The maidens of today can scarcely realize, for instance, the asperity of the training of their embryo great-grandmothers, who were always made to sit in so Spartanly upright a posture that Mrs. Scott, in her seventy-ninth year, boasted that she had never allowed her shoulders to touch the back of her chair!

THE SON’S TRAINING.

As young Walter was one of many children he could not, of course, monopolize his mother’s attention; but probably she recognized the promise of his future greatness (unlike the mother of the duke of Wellington, who thought Arthur the family dunce), and gave him a special care; for, speaking of his early boyhood, he tells us:  “I found much consolation in the partiality of my mother.”  And he goes on to say that she joined to a light and happy temper of mind a strong turn to study poetry and works of imagination.  Like the mothers of the Ettrick Shepherd and of Burns, she repeated to her son the traditionary ballads she knew by heart; and, so soon as he was sufficiently advanced, his leisure hours were usually spent in reading Pope’s translation of Homer aloud to her, which, with the exception of a few ballads and some of Allan Ramsay’s songs, was the first poetry he made acquaintance with.  It must often have been with anxiety, and sometimes not without a struggle, that his mother—­solicitous about every trifle which affected the training of her child—­decided on the books which she was to place in his hands.  She wished him to develop his intellectual faculties, but not at the expense of his spiritual; and romantic frivolity and mental dissipation on the one hand, and a too severe repression—­dangerous in its after reaction—­on the other, were the Scylla and Charybdis between which she had to steer.  The ascetic Puritanism of her training and surroundings would naturally have led her to the narrower and more restrictive view, in which her husband, austerer yet, would have heartily concurred; but her broad sense, quickened by the marvelous insight that comes from maternal love, led her to adopt the broader, and, we may safely add, with Sir Walter’s career and character before us, the better course.  Her courage was, however, tempered with a wise discretion; and when he read to her she was wont, he says, to make him “pause upon those passages which expressed generous and worthy sentiments”—­a most happy method of education, and a most effective