she gloried in his successes when they came, we gather; for when speaking late in life to Dr. Davy about his brother Sir Humphrey’s distinction, Sir Walter, doubtless drawing on his own home memories, remarked, “I hope, Dr. Davy, that your mother lived to see it; there must have been great pleasure in that to her.”  But with whatever zeal Mrs. Scott may have unfolded Sir Walter’s mind by her training, by her praise, by her motherly enthusiasm, it is certain that, from first to last, she loved his soul, and sought its interest, in and above all.  Her final present to him before she died was not a Shakespeare or a Milton, but an old Bible—­the book she loved best; and for her sake Sir Walter loved it too.

Happy was Mrs. Scott in having a son who in all things reciprocated the affection of his mother.  With the first five-guinea fee he earned at the bar he bought a present for her—­a silver taper-stand, which stood on her mantle-piece many a year; when he became enamored of Miss Carpenter he filially wrote to consult his mother about the attachment, and to beg her blessing upon it; when, in 1819, she died at an advanced age, he was in attendance at her side, and, full of occupations though he was, we find him busying himself to obtain for her body a beautifully situated grave.  Thirteen years later he also rested from his labors.  During the last hours of his lingering life he desired to be read to from the New Testament; and when his memory for secular poetry had entirely failed him, the words and the import of the sacred volume were still in his recollection, as were also some of the hymns of his childhood, which his grandson, aged six years, repeated to him.  “Lockhart,” he said to his son-in-law, “I have but a minute to speak to you.  My dear, be a good man; be virtuous, be religious, be a good man.  Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.”

So passed the great author of “Waverley” away.  And when, in due course, his executors came to search for his testament, and lifted up his desk, “we found,” says one of them, “arranged in careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks.”  There were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother’s toilet-table when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate bought for her with his first fee; a row of small packets inscribed by her hand, and containing the hair of such of her children as had died before her; and more odds and ends of a like sort—­pathetic tokens of a love which bound together for a little while here on earth, and binds together for evermore in heaven, Christian mother and son.

      Sir Walter of the land
      Of song and old romance,
    Tradition in his cunning hand
      Obedient as the lance

      His valiant Black Knight bore,
      Wove into literature
    The legend, myth, and homely lore
      Which now for us endure,