avenger of the mother against the father, would be revolting and, at the same time, almost absurd. This depends upon the fact that between father and son there is actual identity of nature, which is the will, but between mother and son there is merely identity of intellect, and even this only in a conditioned manner. Between mother and son the greatest moral opposition can exist, between father and son only an intellectual opposition. From this point of view, also, one should recognise the necessity of the Salic law: the woman cannot carry on the race. Hume says in his short autobiography: “Our mother was a woman of singular merit.” It is said of Kant’s mother in the most recent biography by F. W. Schubert: “According to the judgment of her son himself, she was a woman of great natural understanding. For that time, when there was so little opportunity for the education of girls, she was exceptionally well instructed, and she also continued later to care for her further education by herself. In the course of walks she drew the attention of her son to all kinds of natural phenomena, and tried to explain to him through them the power of God.” What a remarkably able, clever, and superior woman Goethe’s mother was is now universally known. How much she has been spoken of in literature! while his father has not been spoken of at all; Goethe himself describes him as a man of subordinate faculties. Schiller’s mother was susceptible to poetry, and made verses herself, a fragment of which will be found in his biography by Schwab. Bürger, that genuine poetic genius, to whom perhaps the first place after Goethe among German poets belongs—for compared with his ballads those of Schiller seem cold and laboured—has given an account of his parents which for us is significant, and which his friend and physician, Althof repeats in his biography which appeared in 1798, in these words: “Bürger’s father was certainly provided with a variety of knowledge after the manner of study prevalent at the time, and was also a good, honourable man; but he loved his quiet comfort and his pipe of tobacco so much, that, as my friend used to say, he had always first to pull himself together if he was going to apply himself for a quarter of an hour or so to the instruction of his son. His wife was a woman of extraordinary mental endowments, which, however, were so little cultivated that she had scarcely learnt to write legibly. Bürger thought that with proper culture his mother would have been the most famous of her sex, although he several times expressed a strong disapproval of different traits of her moral character. However, he believed that he inherited from his mother some mental gifts, and from his father an agreement with his moral character.” Walter Scott’s mother was a poetess, and was in communication with the wits of her time, as we learn from the obituary notice of Walter Scott in the _Globe_ of 24th September 1832. That poems