226 A Century of Science 



right, coupled with perfect charity toward other peo- 

 ple ; inflexible in principle, she was gentle in prac- 

 tice. Intellectually she could hardly be called bril- 

 liant or accomplished, but she had a strong vein of 

 common sense and practical wisdom, great pene- 

 tration into character, and a good deal of quiet 

 humour." 



Of her six children, the historian, Francis Park- 

 man, was the eldest. As a boy his health was 

 delicate. In a fragment of autobiography, written 

 in the third person, he tells us that "his childhood 

 was neither healthful nor buoyant," and " his boy- 

 hood, though for a time active, was not robust." 

 There was a nervous irritability and impulsiveness 

 which kept driving him into activity more intense 

 than his physical strength was well able to bear. 

 At the same time an inborn instinct of self-control, 

 accompanied, doubtless, by a refined unwillingness 

 to intrude his personal feelings upon the notice 

 of other people, led him into such habits of self- 

 repression that his friends sometimes felicitated him 

 on " having no nerves." There was something 

 rudely stoical in his discipline. As he says : " It 

 was impossible that conditions of the nervous sys- 

 tem abnormal as his had been from infancy should 

 be without their effects on the mind, and some of 

 these were of a nature highly to exasperate him. 



