of their family, have spoken with tenderness of their mother. St. Augustine lauded his so highly, that the Church placed her at his side upon the altars. Lamartine has said so much of his mother in his 'Confidences,' that human nature has been enriched with one of the most beautiful types of the mother known to history; a mother adorable in the beauty of her countenance, and endowed with a heart which seems to be an unfathomable abyss of goodness, love, and enthusiasm, to say nothing of gifts of supreme intelligence which created the soul of Lamartine, that last offshoot of the old aristocratic society which was transfigured under the maternal wing into the angel of peace, destined to announce to unquiet Europe the advent of the Republic.
"To the affections of the heart, there is no mother equal to the one who has presided over our own fate, but when pages like Lamartine's have been read, all mothers do not leave such an image sculptured upon the mind; mine however, God knows, is worthy the honors of apotheosis, and I should not have written these pages if the vigor of her mind had not inspired me to vindicate myself against the injustice of fate in these last years of her laborious life.
"My poor mother! On the night when I descended from Vesuvius, the fever of the emotions I had felt during the day gave me a horrible nightmare instead of the sleep which my agitated limbs needed. The flames of the volcano, and the darkness of the abyss, mingled I know not what of absurd in the terrified imagination, and on waking from those distracting dreams, one idea alone possessed me, tenacious and persistent as a real fact my mother was dead! I wrote that night to my family; a fortnight after I bought a requiem mass in Rome, that the pensionists of Santa Rosa, my pupils, might sing it in her honor; and I made a vow, which I persevered in while I was under the
