eations and pleasures of youth, as did incline them to spend much of
their time in her company, which was to her great content."

The home is the true school of courtesy, of which woman is always the
best practical instructor. "Without woman," says the Provencal proverb,
"men were but ill-licked cubs." Philanthropy radiates from the home as
from a centre. "To love the little platoon we belong to in society,"
said Burke, "is the germ of all public affections." The wisest and
the best have not been ashamed to own it to be their greatest joy and
happiness to sit "behind the heads of children" in the inviolable circle
of home. A life of purity and duty there is not the least effectual
preparative for a life of public work and duty; and the man who loves
his home will not the less fondly love and serve his country. But while
homes, which are the nurseries of character, may be the best of
schools, they may also be the worst. Between childhood and manhood how
incalculable is the mischief which ignorance in the home has the power
to cause! Between the drawing of the first breath and the last, how vast
is the moral suffering and disease occasioned by incompetent mothers and
nurses! Commit a child to the care of a worthless ignorant woman, and no
culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done. Let the mother
be idle, vicious, and a slattern; let her home be pervaded by cavilling,
petulance, and discontent, and it will become a dwelling of misery--a
place to fly from, rather than to fly to; and the children whose
misfortune it is to be brought up there, will be morally dwarfed and
deformed--the cause of misery to themselves as well as to others.

Napoleon Buonaparte was accustomed to say that "the future good or
bad conduct of a child depended entirely on the mother." He himself
attributed his rise in life in a great measure to the training of his
will, his energy, and his self-control, by his mother at home. "Nobody
had any command over him," says one of his biographers, "except his
mother, who found means, by a mixture of tenderness, severity, and
justice, to make him love, respect, and obey her: from her he learnt the
virtue of obedience."

A curious illustration of the dependence of the character of children
on that of the mother incidentally occurs in one of Mr. Tufnell's school
reports. The truth, he observes, is so well established that it has even
been made subservient to mercantile calculation. "I was informed,