The husband, therefore, was just as much enchanted as the wife. He felt himself raised in the scale of creation; he was now a person of more consequence than he had ever been before. Then his affections, which had been arrested by his mother's death, and which might be said to have suffered a blockade since that event, were all set flowing again with redoubled tenderness and activity. His former poverty, too, having prevented him from being an object of competition, his vanity had never been excited, and he was a total stranger, in his own person, to those attentions, which, we are sorry to say, are often disgustingly paid to men by the fair sex, when rank or fortune furnishes motive for entrapping them. Mr. Hartland's gratitude, therefore, to Miss Robinson, for having married him, was as sincere as it was unbounded; and thus this favoured pair were, in the language of the nursery tales of olden time, "as happy as the day is long;" reminding us of the spider, who spinning her web from her own vitals, "lives along the line" of her own daily occupation; or (as we are given to comparison), the Hartlands frequently suggested to our memory the Epicurean aspiration of the celebrated Quin, "Oh, that I had a throat half a mile in length, and palate all the way." Now, the moral palate of Henbury's inhabitants extended to the utmost verge of their possessions; and they might be said to taste and relish whatever they found in their path. They had neither of them seen much of the world, and neither knew any thing of that high and towering intellect, which, like the lofty eagle, quits the level of the plain, and builds its eyrie in an upper world all its own. The Hartlands had sharp common understandings, good nature, and discretion; but they rose not above mediocrity, and were of that class whose _natural_ walk is on the earth. They were _busy_ all day long about every thing; interested alike in the gravest or minutest concerns, and never tortured their brains with any subject of contemplation beyond the reach of sense. Healthful in mind, as well as in body; gay, and continually employed; they talked, and walked, and rode, and drove, dined out, and gave dinners at home, and were never weary of themselves, or of the society around them.