At those seasons when the young advocate sat in his isolation and despair, that arch-enemy of high natures crept into his veins like a drug; he would seek the antidote in that courageous life. This penniless widow of a clergyman in a small village in a remote part of the world had fitted her son for the only sphere in which she looked for distinction for him, by many years of Spartan hardihood in thought and deed. The few pounds the Reverend Henry Northcote had laid by from his pittance, wherewith to provide an education for his son, had been lost in a building society within three months of his own departure from the world. From the date of the disaster his widow had restricted the hours she spent in bed to five out of the twenty-four; had renounced the eating of meat and the most commonplace luxuries; and had practised a thousand and one petty economies in order that her husband’s son should not lack the educational advantages of those with whom he would have to compete. She had maintained him at a public school, and afterwards, for a short period, at the university, by translating classics out of foreign languages for scholastic publishers, and by conveying the rudiments of knowledge to the young children of the landholders who lived in her neighborhood. This stalwart figure formed a wonderful background to his youth. He was filled with awe by a simplicity that was so unconquerable, a self-reliance that was so majestic. All the subtle implements of his nature could not resolve such a potency as that. He himself was so much less and so much more. Strange homage was paid to this unlovely but august woman by the privy council which sat in eternal session in his intellect. The favorite guise in which she was presented to it was as the mother of Napoleon, that “Madame Mère” who in the trenches conceived the Man of Destiny, and walked to church an hour before she gave him to the world. Her martial bearing, large bones, strong country speech, clothed the idea with the flesh of the hard fact; her consciousness of purpose, power of will, ennobled and quickened it with the hues of poetry.