great self-denial
provided him with the means of pursuing it. While living at Dordrecht,
in Holland, she first sent him to Lille to study, and afterwards to
Paris; and her letters to him, while absent, were always full of sound
motherly advice, and affectionate womanly sympathy. "If you could but
see me," she wrote on one occasion, "kissing your picture, then, after
a while, taking it up again, and, with a tear in my eye, calling you 'my
beloved son,' you would comprehend what it costs me to use sometimes the
stern language of authority, and to occasion to you moments of pain. *
* * Work diligently--be, above all, modest and humble; and when you find
yourself excelling others, then compare what you have done with Nature
itself, or with the 'ideal' of your own mind, and you will be secured,
by the contrast which will be apparent, against the effects of pride and
presumption."

Long years after, when Ary Scheffer was himself a grandfather, he
remembered with affection the advice of his mother, and repeated it to
his children. And thus the vital power of good example lives on from
generation to generation, keeping the world ever fresh and young.
Writing to his daughter, Madame Marjolin, in 1846, his departed mother's
advice recurred to him, and he said: "The word MUST--fix it well in
your memory, dear child; your grandmother seldom had it out of hers. The
truth is, that through our lives nothing brings any good fruit except
what is earned by either the work of the hands, or by the exertion of
one's self-denial. Sacrifices must, in short, be ever going on if we
would obtain any comfort or happiness. Now that I am no longer young, I
declare that few passages in my life afford me so much satisfaction
as those in which I made sacrifices, or denied myself enjoyments. 'Das
Entsagen' [11the forbidden] is the motto of the wise man. Self-denial is
the quality of which Jesus Christ set us the example." [1113]

The French historian Michelet makes the following touching reference to
his mother in the Preface to one of his most popular books, the subject
of much embittered controversy at the time at which it appeared:--

"Whilst writing all this, I have had in my mind a woman, whose
strong and serious mind would not have failed to support me in
these contentions. I lost her thirty years ago [11I was a child
then]--nevertheless, ever living in my memory, she follows me from age
to age.

"She suffered with me in my poverty, and was n