Untitled - Electric Scotland

50 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. n.
know," he says, "how much this success was due to my
vivA voce examination in Aristotle, which was conducted
by William Sewell, but I know that Sewell, in consequence
of this examination, recommended me to several pupils,
and always had a friendly feeling towards me through his
overclouded life."
long, chequered, and sadly
Immediately on taking his degree he went to Scotland
for Christmas. It proved a great comfort to him that he
had so arranged, for he was thus enabled to repay in some
measure the tender love and devotion with which old
Betty Morton had watched over his infancy and boyhood.
It is surely a fact worth noticing that three at least
among the leading public men of our generation Lord
Shaftesbury, Lord Lawrence, and Archbishop Tait, have
each of them, in recalling the main influences which con
tributed to mould their lives, assigned a foremost place to
the nurse of their early years. 1 Maria Millis, Margaret
Morse, and Betty Morton deserve one and all to be grate
fully remembered by the English men and women of
to-day. And, as Lord Lawrence s biographer has said,
there are few ties more sacred and more indissoluble
than those which unite the younger, ay, and the elder,
members of a family to an old and trusted nurse. Witness
it some of the most exquisite passages in all literature,
from the time of Deborah the aged nurse of Rebekah, or
Eurykleia the nurse and confidante alike of Telemachus
and Penelope, right down to the Lord of the Isles and
the Lady of the Lake, or, again, to Tennyson s Nurse
of Ninety Years, or, we may add, to Alison Cunningham,
the heroine of Stevenson s touching poem. 2
Finding herself no longer equal to the long
stairs in
1 See Lord Shaftesbtiry s Life, vol. i. pp. 39, etc. ; Lord Lawrence s Life,
vol. i. pp. 133, etc.
Dedication of A Child s Garden of Verses.