n proudly said of Sir Walter as an author that he never forgot
the sanctities of domestic love and social duty in all that he wrote;
and considering how much he did write, and how vast has been the
influence of his work on mankind, we can scarcely overestimate the
importance of the fact. Yet it might have been all wrecked by one little
parental imprudence in this matter of books. And what excuse is there,
after all, for running the terrible risk? Authors who are not fit to be
read by the sons and daughters are rarely read without injury by the
fathers and mothers; and it would be better by far, Savonarola-like, to
make a bonfire of all the literature of folly, wickedness, and
infidelity, than run the risk of injuring a child simply for the sake of
having a few volumes more on one's shelves. In the balance of heaven
there is no parity between a complete library and a lost soul. But this
story has another lesson. It indicates once more the injury which may be
done to character by undue limitations. Under the ill-considered
restrictions of his tutor, which ran counter to the good sense of his
mother, whose wisdom was justified by the event, Walter Scott might
easily have fallen into tricks of concealment and forfeited his
candor--that candor which developed into the noble probity which marked
his conduct to the last. Without candor there can not be truth, and, as
he himself has said, there can be no other virtue without truth.
Fortunately for him, by the wise sanction his mother had given to his
perusal of imaginative writings, she had robbed them of a mystery
unhealthy in itself; and he came through these stolen readings
substantially unharmed, because he knew that his fault was only the
lighter one of sitting up when he was supposed to be lying down.

Luckily this tutor's stern rule did not last long; and when a severe
illness attacked the youth (then advanced to be a student at Edinburgh
College) and brought him under his mother's charge once more, the bed on
which he lay was piled with a constant succession of works of
imagination, and he was allowed to find consolation in poetry and
romance, those fountains which flow forever for the ardent and the
young. It was in relation to Mrs. Scott's control of her son's reading
that he wrote with gratitude, late in life, "My mother had good natural
taste and great feeling." And after her death, in a letter to a friend,
he paid her this tribute: "She had a mind peculiarly well st