aloud to her, which, with the exception of a few ballads and some of
Allan Ramsay's songs, was the first poetry he made acquaintance with. It
must often have been with anxiety, and sometimes not without a struggle,
that his mother--solicitous about every trifle which affected the
training of her child--decided on the books which she was to place in
his hands. She wished him to develop his intellectual faculties, but not
at the expense of his spiritual; and romantic frivolity and mental
dissipation on the one hand, and a too severe repression--dangerous in
its after reaction--on the other, were the Scylla and Charybdis between
which she had to steer. The ascetic Puritanism of her training and
surroundings would naturally have led her to the narrower and more
restrictive view, in which her husband, austerer yet, would have
heartily concurred; but her broad sense, quickened by the marvelous
insight that comes from maternal love, led her to adopt the broader,
and, we may safely add, with Sir Walter's career and character before
us, the better course. Her courage was, however, tempered with a wise
discretion; and when he read to her she was wont, he says, to make him
"pause upon those passages which expressed generous and worthy
sentiments"--a most happy method of education, and a most effective one
in the case of an impressionable boy. A little later, when he passed
from the educational care of his mother to that of a tutor, his
relations to literature changed, as the following passage from his
autobiography will show: "My tutor thought it almost a sin to open a
profane play or poem; and my mother had no longer the opportunity to
hear me read poetry as formerly. I found, however, in her dressing-room,
where I slept at one time, some odd volumes of Shakespeare; nor can I
easily forget the rapture with which I sat up in my shirt reading them
by the light of a fire in her apartment, until the bustle of the family
rising from supper warned me that it was time to creep back to my bed,
where I was supposed to have been safely deposited since 9 o'clock."
This is a suggestive, as well as frank, story. Supposing for a moment
that instead of Shakespeare the room had contained some of the volumes
of verse and romance which, though denying alike the natural and the
supernatural virtues, are to be found in many a Christian home, how
easily might he have suffered a contamination of mind.

DOMESTIC LOVE AND SOCIAL DUTY.

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