, Doddridge had a
mind and a calling of his own.

The heart of Doddridge was just recovering from the wound which the
faithless Kitty had inflicted, when he formed the acquaintance of Mercy
Maris. Come of gentle blood, her dark eyes and raven hair and brunette
complexion were true to their Norman pedigree; and her refined and
vivacious mind was only too well betokened in the mantling cheek, and
the brilliant expression, and the light movements of a delicate and
sensitive frame. When one so fascinating was good and gifted besides,
what wonder that Doddridge fell in love? and what wonder that he deemed
the twenty-second of December (1730) the brightest of days, when it gave
him such a help-meet? Neither of them had ever cause to rue it; and it
is fine to read the correspondence which passed between them, showing
them youthful lovers to the last. When away from home the good doctor
had to write constantly to apprise Mercy that he was still "pure well;"
and in these epistles he records with Pepysian minuteness every incident
which was likely to be important at home; how Mr. Scawen had taken him
to see the House of Commons, and how Lady Abney carried him out in her
coach to Newington; how soon his wrist-bands got soiled in the smoke of
London, and how his horse had fallen into Mr. Coward's well at
Walthamstow; and how he had gone a fishing "with extraordinary success,
for he had pulled a minnow out of the water, though it made shift to get
away." They also contain sundry consultations and references on the
subject of fans and damasks, white and blue. And from one of them we are
comforted to find that the Northampton carrier was conveying a
"harlequin dog" as a present from Kitty's husband to the wife of Kitty's
old admirer--showing, as is abundantly evinced in other ways, how good
an after-crop of friendship may grow on the stubble fields where love
was long since shorn. But our pages are not worthy that we should
transfer into them the better things with which these letters abound.
Nor must we stop to sketch the domestic group which soon gathered round
the paternal table--the son and three daughters who were destined, along
with their mother, to survive for nearly half a century their bright
Northampton home, and, along with the fond father's image, to recall his
first and darling child--the little Tetsy whom "every body loved,
because Tetsy loved every body."

SIR JAMES STONEHOUSE.

The family physician was Dr. Stoneh