Mrs. Skinner wrote, in a letter to Jane Porter:—
“Mary Stace is a sweet, gentle, affectionate, lively girl,—natural, so that you may see at once there is no deceit in her and no guile. She is religious, accomplished, sings sweetly, is pretty, and will make Willis more happy than any other woman I know. He will have no heart-burnings, no misgivings with her, for she is true and sincere. You will love her. She was so religious, good, and depend-on-able that I told her she should be my daughter-in-law.”
In his letters to his folks at home announcing his betrothal, Willis insisted a good deal on this point of his fiancée’s religiousness, and he evidently shared the belief commonly held and proclaimed among men of the world, that religion, like a low voice, is an excellent thing—in woman; a theory which some women resent as a covert insult to their understandings, and some men as an open insult to their religion, and which may be described as the converse of the proposition that a reformed rake makes the best husband.
“I should never have wished to marry you,” he wrote to his betrothed, about a fortnight before the wedding, “if you had not been religious, for I have confidence in no woman who is not so. I only think there is sometimes an excess in the ostentation of religious sanctity, and of that I have a dread, as you have yourself, no doubt. Miss Porter,” he adds, “is sincere and refined as few professedly religious people are.”
In another letter he says:—
“Mine is not a love such as I have fancied and written about. It is more sober, more mingled with esteem and respect, and more fitted for every-day life. It had well need be, indeed, for I have taken it in lieu of what has hitherto been the principal occupation of my life. I am to live for you, dear Mary, and you for me,—if you like! That is to say, henceforth dissipation (if we indulge in it) will be your pleasure, not mine. I have lived the last ten years in gay society, and I am sick at heart of it. I want an apology to try something else. I am made for something better, and I feel sincerely that this is the turning-point of both mind and heart, both of which are injured in their best qualities with the kind of life I have been leading. Do not understand me that I am to make a hermit of myself, however, or a prisoner of you. You will have always friends enough, and society enough, and change of place and scene enough. In short, I shall exact but one thing,—four or five hours in my study in the morning, and you may do what you like with the rest.”
They were married in Plumstead Church, by the Rev. Mr. Shackleton, on the 1st of October. “It was a kind of April day,” writes Willis, “half sunshine, half rain,”—recalling, somehow, the coincidence in Julia Mills’s diary between the checker-board tavern-sign and checkered human existence on a similar occasion in David Copperfield’s life,—“but everybody was kind, the villagers strewed flowers in the way, the church was half full of people, and my heart and eyes were more than full of tears.” The bridal pair were driven in Mr. Stace’s carriage to Rochester, posted next day to Dover, and crossed the Channel on the 3d. They passed a fortnight at the Hôtel Castiglione in Paris, and then returned to England, where they spent the winter, partly in London and partly at Woolwich, and in visits to the Shaws, Skinners, and other friends. Willis was busy in getting out the first and second English editions of “Pencillings” and the “Inklings of Adventure.” He presented his bride to his “swell” acquaintances in London, and was himself introduced by his brothers-in-law to numbers of military people, dined at the Artillery Mess, and was given the freedom of the Army and Navy Club. He set up an “establishment,” a cabriolet and a gray cab-horse, “tall, showy, and magnificent.” He had taken into service a young fellow named William Michell, the son of his landlady, a bright and handsome lad, who now made a very presentable tiger. William went to America with his master in the spring, remained in his service during his residence at Glenmary, and came back with him, in 1839, to England, where he ultimately got employment as a machinist, having a good education and a knack at mechanics.
In May, 1836, after many leave-takings, Willis sailed with his wife for America. His “Lines on Leaving Europe,”—
“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”—