The earlier
and more important part of his education, the beginnings, namely,
of everything he afterwards further followed, his mother herself
gave him, partly because she was both poor and capable, and
partly because she was more anxious than most mothers for his best
welfare. The poverty they had crept through, as those that strive
after better things always will, one way or another, with immeasurable
advantage, and before the time came when he must leave home, her
influence had armed him in adamant--a service which alas! few
mothers seem capable of rendering the knights whom they send out into
the battlefield of the world. Most of them give their children the
best they have; but how shall a foolish woman ever be a wise mother?
The result in his case was, that reverence for her as the type of
womanhood, working along with a natural instinct for refinement, a
keen feeling of the incompatibility with art of anything in itself
low or unclean, and a healthful and successful activity of mind,
had rendered him so far upright and honourable that he had never
yet done that in one mood which in another he had looked back upon
with loathing. As yet he had withstood the temptations belonging
to his youth and his profession--in great measure also the
temptations belonging to success; he had not yet been tried with
disappointment, or sorrow, or failure.
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