ruled the future tendencies of his mature years, which led him to regard with instinctive abhorrence the smallest approach to a return of revolutionary violence. The mother of Guizot escaped the fate of her husband, being in that respect more fortunate than the wives of most of the victims sacrificed to the vengeance of the Jacobins, and removed with her children to Geneva, to which Calvinistic city she originally belonged. She was a woman of strong mind and sound religious principles: she proved an excellent parent to Guizot and his younger brother, to whose training and education she devoted herself with exemplary solicitude. The care of an affectionate and virtuous mother is the most precious boon to man in his tender years, and there is scarcely an instance of one rising to high celebrity who has not enjoyed the fostering tutelage of maternal superintendence in his boyhood. This advantage Guizot possessed in a supreme degree: and it has been related by a visitor, who found her with him on her knee, reading to him incidents from the lives of the great Reformers, that she remarked, 'I wish to show my Frank, by these examples, how much may be effected by determination and diligence;' and assuredly her lessons were not thrown away, for these are the very qualities which have chiefly distinguished him through life. At the age of twelve, having already made considerable progress in the acquisition of the classical and principal modern languages, he was placed under the charge of M. de Joux, a minister of the Reformed Church of Geneva, who was at the head of a considerable seminary in that city. Under the auspices of this instructor of youth he made rapid progress in his studies, seeking still to master the difficulties which shroud from the unenlightened the immortal compositions bequeathed from antiquity or illumining more recent eras. In four years--such was the ardour of the young student--he could boast an intimate acquaintance with all the most illustrious of the Greeks and Romans, with all the most renowned of the nations of modern Europe. Homer, Thucydides, Demosthenes; Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, Ariosto; Schiller, Goethe, Fichte; Shakespeare, Milton, Locke; Racine, Fenelon, Montesquieu--these were the great minds with which he cultivated a familiar intercourse, these the sources from which he drank of the fountain of knowledge, these the ennobling inspirers of his dawning genius. Happy the youth who can embrace the opportunity of such learning, happier he who can appreciate its incomparable virtues, its ineffable charms, its exalted benefits; for no education can be more admirably adapted to refine the mind, develop the understanding, invigorate the intellect, or fill the soul with the divine breath of philosophy! {ix}