at that very period of childhood, when the influence of a father becomes so essential to give nerve to a boy's education. The widow, though reduced to very limited means, was yet not unsupported in the discharge of the arduous task which had devolved upon Mer. The advice and interest of the more prosperous branches of the Pestalutz family relieved her desolate condition, and ensured to the growing youth those facilities for entering upon an honourable career, which in the small aristocracies of Switzerland are almost entirely dependant on parentage and connexions. A more immediate benefit was derived by Henry from the fostering care of one of those faithful servants of good old patriarchal style, whose character is known in our times as a matter of romance rather than of experience. To defend the gentility of the widow's household against the contempt which fortune seemed willing to throw upon it, was Barbara's great ambition, the motive of indefatigable activity in her service; and to see "young master" grow up, to assume in society the rank which his father had held in it, and of which the external evidences were carefully kept up in the interval of his minority, was the object of her tender solicitude and of her anxious hope. Thus were the piety and affection of a mother combined with the generous attachment of a servant, to watch over the early years of a man destined by Providence to vindicate the importance, and ensure the efficacy, of maternal influence, and to stand up as the warm friend and powerful advocate of the lower orders. The experience of his own. heart, traced back beyond the period of self-consciousness or distinct recollection, taught him that the mother's law is, indeed, “an ornament of grace" to the head of the child, and "a chain about his neck;" whilst the disinterested attentions he received from one whom the caprice of rank had placed below his level in society, imposed upon him a debt of gratitude, of which he nobly acquitted himself by vindicating for the neglected classes those moral and intellectual rights, of which they have been despoiled by the ignorant pride of their fellow men.