substitute in good old homely English principles and the instincts of amiable kindly feelings. I know not how it is, but your very clever man never seems to care so much as your less gifted mortals for cleverness in his helpmate. Your scholars, and poets, and ministers of state, are more often than not found assorted with exceedingly humdrum good sort of women, and apparently like them all the better for their deficiencies. Just see how happily Racine lived with his wife, and what an angel he thought her, and yet she had never read his plays. Certainly Goethe never troubled the lady who called him "Mr Privy Councillor" with whims about 'monads,' and speculations on 'colour,' nor those stiff metaphysical problems on which one breaks one's shins in the Second Part of the Faust. Probably it may be that such great geniuses--knowing that, as compared with themselves, there is little difference between your clever woman and your humdrum woman--merge at once all minor distinctions, relinquish all attempts that could not but prove unsatisfactory, at sympathy in hard intellectual pursuits, and are quite satisfied to establish that tie which, after all, best resists wear and tear--viz. the tough household bond between one human heart and another. At all events, this, I suspect, was the reasoning of Dr Riccabocca, when one morning, after a long walk with Miss Hazeldean, he muttered to himself-- "Duro con duro Non fece mai buon muro." Which may bear the paraphrase, "Bricks without mortar would make a very bad wall." There was quite enough in Miss Jemima's disposition to make excellent mortar: the Doctor took the bricks to himself. When his examination was concluded, our philosopher symbolically evinced the result he had arrived at by a very simple proceeding on his part--which would have puzzled you greatly if you had not paused, and meditated thereon, till you saw all that it implied. _Dr Riccabocca took off his spectacles!_ He wiped them carefully, put them into their shagreen case, and locked them in his bureau:--that is to say, he left off wearing his spectacles.