loathsome convict-ship,--in the cell of the condemned,--at the foot of the scaffold! All, all, have deserted him,--save He who died for him, and she who gave him birth. Such is the nature, such the constancy of a mother’s love. It begins before birth, and continues after death: “There are spun Around the heart such tender ties, That our own children, to our eyes, Are dearer than the sun.” There are four forms in which this love is peculiarly conspicuous: when, 1st The child is criminal; 2nd The child is sick; 3rd The child is dying; 4th The child is dead. This tenderness of a mother’s love when the child is criminal, is beautifully described by Hogarth, in his picture of “Industry and Idleness,” in that aged woman, who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished, to her brutal vice-hardened son, whom she is accompanying to the ship, which is to bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy,--in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute beast to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered; and feels it must belong to her while a pulse, by the vindictive laws of his country, shall be suffered to beat in it. There is a melancholy instance in the love of a mother for her child, in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, for the year 1732, in the trial of John Waller. It is scarcely possible to conceive a more abandoned miscreant than Waller. He was at last detected and sentenced to the pillory; the mob seized him and beat him to death. His dead body was put into a coach and carried to Newgate. The prisoners refused to receive it; his mother who was in waiting, regardless of the infuriated mob, went into the coach, and placing his head in her lap, took away the dead body of her child. At this very instant how many mothers are anxiously watching their sick children--unmindful of their own fatigue, or food, or rest! In a storm in the Yarmouth Roads a vessel was wrecked, a young woman was seen clinging to a mast,--she was seen raising her child above the highest wave, in a wild and vain attempt to save it. On the next morning she was drifting to the shore, “And like a common weed The sea-swell took her hair.” A fire destroyed a house, in which several lives were lost, among which a woman and her infant perished. On digging out the ruins, the mother was found burnt to death, but on her knees, holding her infant in a pail of water.