Luckily this tutor’s stern rule did not last long; and when a severe illness attacked the youth (then advanced to be a student at Edinburgh College) and brought him under his mother’s charge once more, the bed on which he lay was piled with a constant succession of works of imagination, and he was allowed to find consolation in poetry and romance, those fountains which flow forever for the ardent and the young.  It was in relation to Mrs. Scott’s control of her son’s reading that he wrote with gratitude, late in life, “My mother had good natural taste and great feeling.”  And after her death, in a letter to a friend, he paid her this tribute:  “She had a mind peculiarly well stored.  If I have been able to do any thing in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me.  She was a strict economist, which, she said, enabled her to be liberal.  Out of her little income of about fifteen hundred dollars a year, she bestowed at least a third in charities; yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance.”  Her charity, as well as her love for genealogy, and her aptitude for story-telling, was transmitted to her son.  It found expression in him, not only in material gifts to the poor, but in a conscientious care and consideration for the feelings of others.  This trait is beautifully exhibited by many of the facts recorded by Lockhart in his famous memoir, and also by a little incident, not included there, which I have heard Sir Henry Taylor tell, and which, besides illustrating the subject, deserves for its own sake a place in print.  The great and now venerable author of “Philip Van Artevelde” dined at Abbotsford only a year or two before the close of its owner’s life.  Sir Walter had then lost his old vivacity, though not his simple dignity; but for one moment during the course of the evening he rose into animation, and it happened thus:  There was a talk among the party of an excursion which was to be made on the following day, and during the discussion of the plans Miss Scott mentioned that two elderly maiden ladies, living in the neighborhood, were to be of the number, and hinted that their company would be a bore.  The chivalrous kindliness of her father’s heart was instantly aroused.  “I can not call that good-breeding,” he said, in an earnest and dignified tone—­a rebuke which echoed the old-fashioned teaching on the duties of true politeness he had heard from his mother half a century before.

We would gladly know more than we do of Mrs. Scott’s attitude toward her son when first his penchant for authorship was shown.  That she smiled on his early evidences of talent, and fostered them, we may well imagine; and the tenderness with which she regarded his early compositions is indicated by the fact that a copy of verses, written in a boyish scrawl, was carefully preserved by her, and found, after her death, folded in a paper on which was inscribed, “My Walter’s first lines, 1782.”  That