ot allowed to share my
better fortune. When young, I made her sad, and now I cannot console
her. I know not even where her bones are: I was too poor then to buy
earth to bury her!"

"And yet I owe her much. I feel deeply that I am the son of woman.
Every instant, in my ideas and words [11not to mention my features and
gestures], I find again my mother in myself. It is my mother's blood
which gives me the sympathy I feel for bygone ages, and the tender
remembrance of all those who are now no more."

"What return then could I, who am myself advancing towards old age, make
her for the many things I owe her? One, for which she would have thanked
me--this protest in favour of women and mothers." [1114]

But while a mother may greatly influence the poetic or artistic mind
of her son for good, she may also influence it for evil. Thus the
characteristics of Lord Byron--the waywardness of his impulses, his
defiance of restraint, the bitterness of his hate, and the precipitancy
of his resentments--were traceable in no small degree to the adverse
influences exercised upon his mind from his birth by his capricious,
violent, and headstrong mother. She even taunted her son with his
personal deformity; and it was no unfrequent occurrence, in the violent
quarrels which occurred between them, for her to take up the poker or
tongs, and hurl them after him as he fled from her presence. [1115] It was
this unnatural treatment that gave a morbid turn to Byron's after-life;
and, careworn, unhappy, great, and yet weak as he was, he carried about
with him the mother's poison which he had sucked in his infancy. Hence
he exclaims, in his 'Childe Harold':--

"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus, UNTAUGHT IN YOUTH MY HEART TO TAME,
MY SPRINGS OF LIFE WERE POISONED."

In like manner, though in a different way, the character of Mrs. Foote,
the actor's mother, was curiously repeated in the life of her joyous,
jovial-hearted son. Though she had been heiress to a large fortune,
she soon spent it all, and was at length imprisoned for debt. In this
condition she wrote to Sam, who had been allowing her a hundred a year
out of the proceeds of his acting:-"Dear Sam, I am in prison for
debt; come and assist your loving mother, E. Foote." To which her son
characteristicall