MOTHERS OF GREAT MEN.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 November 1917, Page 8

MOTHERS OF GREAT MEN.

The Herald of the Golden Age, in a talk on the ideal of motherhood slowly emerging from the old-world traditions that we knew gives the following particulars of three mothers of famous men:

The mother of Shakespeare married a feeble-willed, incompetent sort of a man, and in spite of his wpakness she gave Shakespeare to the world. The mother of Lincoln, Nancy Hanka, was a giantess of America's pioneering days. She married a feeble, shillyshallying little man. She gave to Lincoln her -gigantic body and physical power. She gave to him her strength of will that enabled him to hold on, saying when others were discouraged that he would fight it out though it might be necessary to pay for every drop of blood drawn by the lash with another drop drawn by the sword. Yet a million men, if they heard the name, Nancy Hanks, would think of a trotting horse, not of a woman.

Napoleon's father was anotber interesting weakling. His mother, who bore children before she was fifteen, and came back from the battlefield to give birth to Napoleon, gave him hi 3 power and his genius, saved his money when everyone else was squandering it, and stuck to him when he was a prisoner at St. Helena, abandoned by others. What a mother is to her great son, the artist is to the painting or the poet to the creature of his imagination. She