For the future man, however, we may doubt whether she was the best of mothers.

Her education was meagre--a defect which her conscientious husband did his best to amend; and all her characteristics were fitted rather to evoke affection than to inspire respect.

Though her son always speaks of her with tender regard, his tone is that of an elder brother to a sister rather than of a son to a parent.

She was herself conscious of her incompetence to discharge all the responsibilities of a mother which the character of the father made specially onerous.

"We were young together," she said of herself and her son, and she confessed frankly that "she could educate no child." Thus between an unsympathetic father and a mother incapable of influencing the deeper springs of character, Goethe passed through childhood and boyhood without the discipline of temper and will which only the home can give.