re themselves drawn along by their age.

In September (1835), after long suffering, his mother died amid tender
care and mournful regrets. Her youngest son was a devoted nurse; her
loss struck him keenly, but with a sense full of the consolations of his
faith. To Gaskell he writes: 'How deeply and thoroughly her character
was imbued with love; with what strong and searching processes of bodily
affliction she was assimilated in mind and heart to her Redeemer; how
above all other things she sighed for the advancement of His kingdom on
earth; how few mortals suffered more pain, or more faithfully recognised
it as one of the instruments by which God is pleased to forward that
restoring process for which we are placed on earth.'

Then the world resumed its course for him, and things fell into their
wonted ways of indefatigable study. His scheme for week-days included
Blackstone, Mackintosh, Aristotle's _Politics_--'a book of immense value
for all governors and public men'--Dante's _Purgatorio_, Spanish
grammar, Tocqueville, Fox's _James II._, by which he was disappointed,
not seeing such an acuteness in extracting and exhibiting the principles
that govern from beneath the actions of men and parties, nor such a
grasp of generalisation, nor such a faculty of separating minute from
material particulars, nor such an abstraction from a debater's modes of
thought and forms of expression, as he should have hoped. To these he
added as he went along the _Genie du Christianisme_, Bolingbroke,
Bacon's _Essays_, _Don Quixote_, the _Annals_ of Tacitus, Le Bas' _Life
of Laud_ ('somewhat too Laudish, though right _au fond_'; unlike
Lawson's _Laud_, 'a most intemperate book, the foam swallows up all the
facts'), _Childe Harold_, _Jerusalem Delivered_ ('beautiful in its kind,
but how can its author be placed in the same category of genius as
Dante?'), Pollok's _Course of Time_ ('much talent, little culture,
insufficient power to digest and construct his subject or his
versification; his politics radical, his religious sentiments generally
sound, though perhaps hard').

In the evenings he read aloud to his father the _Faery Queen_ and
Shakespeare. On Sundays he read Chillingworth and Jewel, and, above all,
he dug and delved in St. Augustine. He drew a sketch of a project
touching Peculiarities in Religion. For several days he was writing
something on politics. Then an outline or an essay on our colonial
system. For he was no reader of the l