kindled his genius by reciting the old Scottish ballads, while to his father he attributed his less pleasing cast of character.  Bishop WATSON traced to the affectionate influence of his mother, the religious feelings which he confesses he inherited from her.  The mother of EDGEWORTH, confined through life to her apartment, was the only person who studied his constitutional volatility.  When he hastened to her death-bed, the last imperfect accents of that beloved voice reminded him of the past and warned him of the future, and he declares that voice “had a happy influence on his habits,”—­as happy, at least, as his own volatile nature would allow.  “To the manner in which my mother formed me at an early age,” said Napoleon, “I principally owe my subsequent elevation.  My opinion is, that the future good or bad conduct of a child entirely depends upon the mother.”

There is this remarkable in the strong affections of the mother in the formation of the literary character, that, without even partaking of, or sympathising with the pleasures the child is fond of, the mother will often cherish those first decided tastes merely from the delight of promoting the happiness of her son; so that that genius, which some would produce on a preconceived system, or implant by stratagem, or enforce by application, with her may be only the watchful labour of love.[A] One of our most eminent antiquaries has often assured me that his great passion, and I may say his genius, for his curious knowledge and his vast researches, he attributes to maternal affection.  When his early taste for these studies was thwarted by the very different one of his father, the mother silently supplied her son with the sort of treasures he languished for, blessing the knowledge, which indeed she could not share with him, but which she beheld imparting happiness to her youthful antiquary.

[Footnote A:  Kotzebue has noted the delicate attention of his mother in not only fostering his genius, but in watching its too rapid development.  He says:—­“If at any time my imagination was overheated, my mother always contrived to select something for my evening reading which might moderate this ardour, and make a gentler impression on my too irritable fancy.”—­ ED.]

There is, what may be called, FAMILY GENIUS.  In the home of a man of genius is diffused an electrical atmosphere, and his own pre-eminence strikes out talents in all.  “The active pursuits of my father,” says the daughter of EDGEWORTH, “spread an animation through the house by connecting children with all that was going on, and allowing them to join in thought and conversation; sympathy and emulation excited mental exertion in the most agreeable manner.”  EVELYN, in his beautiful retreat at Saye’s Court, had inspired his family with that variety of taste which he himself was spreading throughout the nation.  His son translated Rapin’s “Gardens,” which poem the father proudly preserved in his “Sylva;” his lady, ever busied in his study, excelled in the arts her husband loved, and designed the frontispiece to his “Lucretius:”  she was the cultivator of their celebrated garden, which served as “an example” of his great work on “forest trees.”  Cowley, who has commemorated Evelyn’s love of books and gardens, has delightfully applied them to his lady, in whom, says the bard, Evelyn meets both pleasures:—­