There were examples. Aristocracy had ere now condescended to wealth;
earls had married women rich by tallow-importing papas; and no doubt,
had these same earls been consulted in Gatty's case, they would have
decided that Christie Johnstone, with her real and funded property, was
not a villainous match for a green grocer's son, without a rapp;* but
Mrs. Gatty did not reason so, did not reason at all, luckily, her heart
ran away with her judgment, and, her judgment ceasing to act, she became
a wise woman.

*A diminutive German coin.

The case was peculiar. Gatty was a artist _pur sang_--and Christie, who
would not have been the wife for a _petit maitre,_ was the wife of wives
for him.

He wanted a beautiful wife to embellish his canvas, disfigured hitherto
by an injudicious selection of models; a virtuous wife to be his crown;
a prudent wife to save him from ruin; a cheerful wife to sustain his
spirits, drooping at times by virtue of his artist's temperament; an
intellectual wife to preserve his children from being born dolts and
bred dunces, and to keep his own mind from sharpening to one point,
and so contracting and becoming monomaniacal. And he found all these
qualities, together with the sun and moon of human existence--true love
and true religion--in Christie Johnstone.

In similar cases, foolish men have set to work to make, in six months,
their diamond of nature, the exact cut and gloss of other men's pastes,
and, nervously watching the process, have suffered torture; luckily
Charles Gatty was not wise enough for this; he saw nature had
distinguished her he loved beyond her fellows; here, as elsewhere, he
had faith in nature--he believed that Christie would charm everybody of
eye, and ear, and mind, and heart, that approached her; he admired her
as she was, and left her to polish herself, if she chose. He did well;
she came to London with a fine mind, a broad brogue, a delicate ear; she
observed how her husband's friends spoke, and in a very few months she
had toned down her Scotch to a rich Ionic coloring, which her womanly
instinct will never let her exchange for the thin, vinegar accents that
are too prevalent in English and French society; and in other respects
she caught, by easy gradation, the tone of the new society to which her
marriage introduced her, without, however, losing her charming self.

The wise dowager lodges hard by, having resisted an invitation to be in
the same house; she comes to