The chivalrous kindliness of her
father's heart was instantly aroused. "I can not call that
good-breeding," he said, in an earnest and dignified tone--a rebuke
which echoed the old-fashioned teaching on the duties of true politeness
he had heard from his mother half a century before.
We would gladly know more than we do of Mrs. Scott's attitude toward her
son when first his _penchant_ for authorship was shown. That she smiled
on his early evidences of talent, and fostered them, we may well
imagine; and the tenderness with which she regarded his early
compositions is indicated by the fact that a copy of verses, written in
a boyish scrawl, was carefully preserved by her, and found, after her
death, folded in a paper on which was inscribed, "My Walter's first
lines, 1782." That she gloried in his successes when they came, we
gather; for when speaking late in life to Dr. Davy about his brother Sir
Humphrey's distinction, Sir Walter, doubtless drawing on his own home
memories, remarked, "I hope, Dr. Davy, that your mother lived to see it;
there must have been great pleasure in that to her." But with whatever
zeal Mrs. Scott may have unfolded Sir Walter's mind by her training, by
her praise, by her motherly enthusiasm, it is certain that, from first
to last, she loved his soul, and sought its interest, in and above all.
Her final present to him before she died was not a Shakespeare or a
Milton, but an old Bible--the book she loved best; and for her sake Sir
Walter loved it too.
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