ow 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 Past 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 at sympathy in hard intellectual pursuits, and are quite
satisfied to establish that tie which, after all, best resists wear
and tear,--namely, 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 fete 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 of 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.

You will observe that there was a wonderful depth of meaning in that
critical symptom, whether it be regarded as a sign outward, positive,
and explicit, or a sign metaphysical, mystical, and esoteric. For, as
to the last, it denoted that the task of the spectacles was over;
that, when a philosopher has made up his mind to marry, it is better
henceforth to be shortsighted--nay, even somewhat purblind--than to
be always scrutinizing the domestic felicity, to which he is abou