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 is now on the straight road to bring him into that situation most likely to engage the warm partisanship of a true woman,—­namely, that of a man unjustly abused for right-doing,—­and one may see that it is ten to one our Mary may fall in love with him yet, before she knows it.

If it were not for this mysterious selfness-and-sameness which makes this wild, wandering, uncanonical sailor, James Marvyn, so intimate and internal,—­if his thread were not knit up with the thread of her life,—­were it not for the old habit of feeling for him, thinking for him, praying for him, hoping for him, fearing for him, which—­woe is us!—­is the unfortunate habit of womankind,—­if it were not for that fatal something which neither judgment, nor wishes, nor reason, nor common sense shows any great skill in unravelling,—­we are quite sure that Mary would be in love with the Doctor within the next six months; as it is, we leave you all to infer from your own heart and consciousness what his chances are.

A new sort of scene is about to open on our heroine, and we shall show her to you, for an evening at least, in new associations, and with a different background from that homely and rural one in which she has fluttered as a white dove amid leafy and congenial surroundings.

As we have before intimated, Newport presented a resume of many different phases of society, all brought upon a social level by the then universally admitted principle of equality.