o condemn for their effect upon his character. He
was strong, good, clever, and handsome, and exceptionally all those four
good reasons for loving him; and the intellectual sympathy, the sharing
of broader interests, which she sometimes missed in him, she had for
some three or four years come to find in her eldest son, who, to his
father's bewilderment and disappointment, had reincarnated his own
strong will, in connection with literary practices and dreams which
threatened to end in his becoming a poet, instead of the business man
expected of him, for which development that love of poetry in one
parent, and a certain love of books in both, was no doubt to some degree
guiltily responsible.

James Mesurier, as we have said, was no judge of poetry; and, had he
been so, a reading of his son's early effusions would have made him
still more obdurate in the choice for him of a commercial career; but on
general principles he was quite sufficiently firm against any but the
most non-committing, leisure-hour flirtation with the Muse. The mother,
while agreeing with the father's main proposition of the undesirability,
nay, impossibility, of literature as a livelihood,--had not the great
and successful Sir Walter himself described it as a good walking-stick,
but a poor crutch; a stick applied, since its first application as an
image, to the shoulders of how many generations of youthful genius,--was
naturally more sympathetic towards her son's ambition, and encouraged it
to the extent of helping from her housekeeping money the formation of
his little library, even occasionally proving successful in winning sums
of money from the father for the purchase of some book specially, as the
young man would declare, necessary for his development.

As this little library had outgrown the accommodation of the common
rooms, a daring scheme had been conceived between mother and son,--no
less than that he should have a small room set apart for himself as a
study. When first broached to the father, this scheme had met with an
absolute denial that seemed to promise no hope of further consideration;
but the mother, accepting defeat at the time, had tried again and again,
with patient dexterity at favourable moments, till at last one proud day
the little room, with its bookshelves, a cast of Dante, and a strange
picture or two, was a beautiful, significant fact--all ready for the
possible visitation of the Muse.

In such ways had the mother negotia