she deems noblest in man? Does not old Richard
Baxter tell us, with delightful single-heartedness, how his wife fell
in love with him first, spite of his long, pale face,--and how she
confessed, dear soul, after many years of married life, that she had
found him _less_ sour and bitter than she had expected?

The fact is, women are burdened with fealty, faith, reverence, more
than they know what to do with; they stand like a hedge of sweet-peas,
throwing out fluttering tendrils everywhere for something high and
strong to climb by,--and when they find it, be it ever so rough in the
bark, they catch upon it. And instances are not wanting of those who
have turned away from the flattery of admirers to prostrate themselves
at the feet of a genuine hero who never wooed them, except by heroic
deeds and the rhetoric of a noble life.

Never was there a distinguished man whose greatness could sustain the
test of minute domestic inspection better than our Doctor. Strong in a
single-hearted humility, a perfect unconsciousness of self, an honest
and sincere absorption in high and holy themes and objects, there was in
him what we so seldom see,--a perfect logic of life; his minutest deeds
were the true results of his sublimest principles. His whole nature,
moral, physical, and intellectual, was simple, pure, and cleanly. He was
temperate as an anchorite in all matters of living,--avoiding, from a
healthy instinct, all those intoxicating stimuli then common among the
clergy. In his early youth, indeed, he had formed an attachment to the
almost universal clerical pipe,--but, observing a delicate woman once
nauseated by coming into the atmosphere which he and his brethren had
polluted, he set himself gravely to reflect that that which could so
offend a woman must needs be uncomely and unworthy a Christian man;
wherefore he laid his pipe on the mantelpiece, and never afterwards
resumed the indulgence.

In all his relations with womanhood he was delicate and reverential,
forming his manners by that old precept, "The elder women entreat as
mothers, the younger as sisters,"--which rule, short and simple as
it is, is nevertheless the most perfect _resume_, of all true
gentlemanliness. Then, as for person, the Doctor was not handsome, to be
sure; but he was what sometimes serves with woman better,--majestic
and manly, and, when animated by thought and feeling, having even a
commanding grandeur of mien. Add to all this, that our valiant hero