III.
SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS MOTHER.
THE MOTHER'S EDUCATION--THE SON'S TRAINING--DOMESTIC LOVE AND SOCIAL DUTIES.
It was in the Spring of 1758 that the daughter of a distinguished professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh changed her maiden name of Rutherford for her married name of Scott, having the happiness to unite her lot with one who was not only a scrupulously honorable man, but who, from his youth up, had led a singularly blameless life. Well does Coventry Patmore sing:
"Who is the happy husband? He,
Who, scanning his unwedded life,
Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free,
'Twas faithful to his future wife."
Such a husband as this was the father of Sir Walter Scott, a writer to the signet (or lawyer) in large practice in Edinburgh. He had never been led from the right way; and when the less virtuously inclined among the 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!