THE SON'S TRAINING.


As young Walter was one of many children he could not, of course,
monopolize his mother's attention; but probably she recognized the
promise of his future greatness (unlike the mother of the duke of
Wellington, who thought Arthur the family dunce), and gave him a special
care; for, speaking of his early boyhood, he tells us: "I found much
consolation in the partiality of my mother." And he goes on to say that
she joined to a light and happy temper of mind a strong turn to study
poetry and works of imagination. Like the mothers of the Ettrick
Shepherd and of Burns, she repeated to her son the traditionary ballads
she knew by heart; and, so soon as he was sufficiently advanced, his
leisure hours were usually spent in reading Pope's translation of Homer
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