In the balance of heaven
there is no parity between a complete library and a lost soul. But this
story has another lesson. It indicates once more the injury which may be
done to character by undue limitations. Under the ill-considered
restrictions of his tutor, which ran counter to the good sense of his
mother, whose wisdom was justified by the event, Walter Scott might
easily have fallen into tricks of concealment and forfeited his
candor--that candor which developed into the noble probity which marked
his conduct to the last. Without candor there can not be truth, and, as
he himself has said, there can be no other virtue without truth.
Fortunately for him, by the wise sanction his mother had given to his
perusal of imaginative writings, she had robbed them of a mystery
unhealthy in itself; and he came through these stolen readings
substantially unharmed, because he knew that his fault was only the
lighter one of sitting up when he was supposed to be lying down.
Luckily this tutor's stern rule did not last long; and when a severe
illness attacked the youth (then advanced to be a student at Edinburgh
College) and brought him under his mother's charge once more, the bed on
which he lay was piled with a constant succession of works of
imagination, and he was allowed to find consolation in poetry and
romance, those fountains which flow forever for the ardent and the
young. It was in relation to Mrs. Scott's control of her son's reading
that he wrote with gratitude, late in life, "My mother had good natural
taste and great feeling.
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