But motherhood is more than this: it is a new personality put on with pain, worn with mingled joy and anxiety, only to be put off with death. Its qualities are universal, and there would be only idleness in an elaborate attempt to ascribe any particular maternal character to the English, as opposed to any other, mother. She is but one of the world of mothers with all their virtues, pleasures and sorrows, as deeply moved by the mystery, as keenly wounded by the arrows, as proudly equal to the sacrifices of motherhood as a woman of another nation. Nationality does not enter into motherhood, which is a function of universal humanity, so well understood that, instead of being emotionally exhaustive on the subject, I have only to refer each reader to the memories of his or her own heart, where childhood, if not marriage also, has stored some of its most precious secrets. There may be degrees of motherly feeling, for instance between the hen with a brood and the cow with a single calf,—a contrast which has its human counterpart—but for all mothers the essential quality is that of the pelican. I need say no more than that English mothers make the most admirable pelicans, sparing themselves no more and devoting themselves no less than those of other nations. In no country, therefore, is the mother more honoured or cherished: and if the tie that binds a man to his mother in later life is less emotionally strong than with some Latin nations, it is because an Englishman directs his emotions habitually along different channels, not because his heart is devoid of a very precious memory, indelibly enshrined. But it is possible to over-sentimentalise this theme by dwelling on it. Certain passages in “Pendennis” come to my mind as I write the words in which Thackeray pulls out the “vox pathetica” in reflecting on the relations between Arthur and his mother. When one is treated to voluntaries of this kind one has an irresistible inclination to be horrid and realistic, remembering that in England, as in all other countries, there are mothers who do not deserve the name, that baby clinics would be not so urgently necessary in our big towns if all mothering were perfect, and that Samuel Butler wrote a book called “The Way of All Flesh,” which is a strong-tasting antidote to any overdoses of sentiment in the matter of parenthood. How Thackeray would have disliked that book! Yet the truth in it will live as long as “Pendennis.” Lately, however, what with “Fanny’s First Play,” “The Younger Generation” and the like, dilutions of this truth have been a little too freely administered: so I prefer to leave the ultimate moralisings to the individual.