It is barely possible that Charles Lamb was right when he declared that no woman married to a genius ever believed her husband to be one.  We know that the wife of Edmund Spenser became the Faerie Queene of another soon after his demise, and whenever Spenser was praised in her presence she put on a look that plainly said, “I could a tale unfold.”

My own opinion is that a genius makes a very bad husband.  And further, I have no faith in that specious plea, “A woman who marries a second time confers upon her first husband the highest compliment, for her action implies that she was so happy in her first love that she is more than willing to try it again.”

I think the reverse is more apt to be the truth, and that the woman who has been sorely disappointed in her first marriage is anxious to try the great experiment over again, in order if possible to secure that bliss which every daughter of Eve feels is her rightful due.

Maria Ruthven lived to rear a goodly brood of children, and Samuel Pepys records that she used to send a sort o’ creepy feeling down the backs of callers by innocently introducing her children thus:  “This is my eldest daughter, whose father was Sir Anthony Van Dyck, of whom you have doubtless heard; and these others are my children by my present husband, Sergeant Nobody.”  Van Dyck’s remains are buried in Saint Paul’s Cathedral.  A very fine monument, near the grave of Turner, marks the spot; but his best monument is in the examples of his work that are to be found in every great art-gallery of the world.

FORTUNY

I think I knew Fortuny as well as any one did.  He was surcharged with energy, animation and good-cheer; and the sunshine he worked into every canvas he attempted, was only a reflection of the sparkling, gem-like radiance of his own nature.  He absorbed from earth, air, sky, the waters and men, and transmuted all dross into gold.  To him all things were good.

    —­Letter From Regnault

[Illustration:  Fortuny]

Now, once upon a day there was a swart, stubby boy by the name of Mariano Fortuny.  He was ten years old, going on ’leven, and lived with his grandfather away up and up four flights of rickety stairs in an old house at the village of Reus, in Spain.  Mariano’s father had died some years before—­died mysteriously in a drunken fight at a fair, where he ran a Punch and Judy show.  Some said the Devil had come and carried him off, just as he nightly did Mr. Punch.

Frowsy, little, shock-headed Mariano didn’t feel so awfully bad when his father died, because his father used to make him turn the hand-organ all day, and half the night, and take up the collections; and the fond parent used to cuff him when there were less than ten coppers in the tambourine.  They traveled around from place to place, with a big yellow dog and a little blue wagon that contained the show.  They hitched their wagon to a dog.  At night they would sleep in some shed back of a tavern, or under a table at a market, and Mariano would pillow his head on the yellow dog and curl up in a ball trying to keep warm.