This intelligent father, an obscure tax-gatherer, discovered the propensity of Horace’s mind; for he removed the boy of genius from a rural seclusion to the metropolis, anxiously attending on him to his various masters.  GROTIUS, like Horace, celebrated in verse his gratitude to his excellent father, who had formed him not only to be a man of learning, but a great character.  VITRUVIUS pours forth a grateful prayer to the memory of his parents, who had instilled into his soul a love for literary and philosophical subjects; and it is an amiable trait in PLUTARCH to have introduced his father in the Symposiacs, as an elegant critic and moralist, and his brother Lamprias, whose sweetness of disposition, inclining to cheerful raillery, the Sage of Cheronaea has immortalised.  The father of GIBBON urged him to literary distinction, and the dedication of the “Essay on Literature” to that father, connected with his subsequent labour, shows the force of the excitement.  The father of POPE lived long enough to witness his son’s celebrity.

  Tears such as tender fathers shed,
     Warm from my eyes descend,
  For joy, to think when I am dead,
     My son shall have mankind his Friend.[A]

The son of BUFFON one day surprised his father by the sight of a column, which he had raised to the memory of his father’s eloquent genius.  “It will do you honour,” observed the Gallic sage.[B] And when that son in the revolution was led to the guillotine, he ascended in silence, so impressed with his father’s fame, that he only told the people, “I am the son of Buffon!”

[Footnote A:  These lines have been happily applied by Mr. BOWLES to the father of POPE.—­The poet’s domestic affections were as permanent as they were strong.]

[Footnote B:  It still exists in the gardens of the old chateau at Montbard.  It is a pillar of marble bearing this inscription:—­“Excelsae turris humilia columna, Parenti suo filius Buffon. 1785.”—­ED.]

Fathers absorbed in their occupations can but rarely attract their offspring.  The first durable impressions of our moral existence come from the mother.  The first prudential wisdom to which Genius listens falls from her lips, and only her caresses can create the moments of tenderness.  The earnest discernment of a mother’s love survives in the imagination of manhood.  The mother of Sir WILLIAM JONES, having formed a plan for the education of her son, withdrew from great connexions that she might live only for that son.  Her great principle of education, was to excite by curiosity; the result could not fail to be knowledge.  “Read, and you will know,” she constantly replied to her filial pupil.  And we have his own acknowledgment, that to this maxim, which produced the habit of study, he was indebted for his future attainments.  KANT, the German metaphysician, was always fond of declaring that he owed to the ascendancy of his mother’s character the severe inflexibility of his moral principles.  The mother of BURNS