companions of his early life in Edinburgh found that they could not
corrupt him, they ceased after a little while to laugh at him, and
learned to honor him and to confide in him, "which is certainly," says
he who makes the record on the authority of Mrs. Scott herself, "a great
inducement to young men in the outset of life to act a similar part." It
does not appear that old Walter Scott sought for beauty of person in his
bride, though no doubt the face he loved was more beautiful to him than
that of the bonniest belle in Scotland; but beauty of mind and
disposition she certainly had. Of her father it is told that, when in
practice as "a physician, he never gave a prescription without silently
invoking on it the blessing of Heaven, and the piety which dictated the
custom had been inherited by his daughter.


THE MOTHER'S' EDUCATION.


Mrs. Scott's education, also, had been an excellent one--giving, besides
a good general grounding, an acquaintance with literature, and not
neglecting "the more homely duties of the needle and the account-book."
Her manners, moreover (an important and too often neglected factor in a
mother's influence over her children), were finished and elegant, though
intolerably stiff in some respects, when compared with the manners and
habits of to-day. The maidens of today can scarcely realize, for
instance, the asperity of the training of their embryo
great-grandmothers, who were always made to sit in so Spartanly upright
a posture that Mrs. Scott, in her seventy-ninth year, boasted that she
had never allowed her shoulders to touch the back of her chair!