How little, then, did Milton deserve the Paradise of which he wrote, for he was married no less than three times, and that, too, after the unpleasant experiences of his first alliance. Mary Powell, his first wife, was a shrew. She was the daughter of an Oxfordshire Royalist, and, disgusted and alarmed at the severity with which Milton, who was then a dominie, treated the boys under his charge, she left him after the honeymoon and returned home. For three years she kept apart, paying no attention to his requests for her to return, and she only rejoined him after Naseby, when, the Royalist hopes being shattered, it seemed advisable that she and her people should seek the shelter that the roof of so uncompromising a Puritan afforded. He received her, and for the remaining fifteen years she made his life miserable.

Addison made a great social triumph for eighteenth-century literature when he married the widowed Countess of Warwick, but in doing so he sowed the whirlwind for his own reaping. Her arrogance was monumental, and she made her stately house at Kensington so unbearable to him, that he was used to fly her presence and take refuge in a little country tavern that stood in those days on the high road to London, at the corner of a lane which is now the Earl’s Court Road. Domestic strife drove him to the bottle, and the ‘Spectator’ died ‘like a Christian,’ indeed, but with an intellect clouded by drink.

In more recent times, the marriages of Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dickens were notoriously unhappy; but, certainly, these three men of genius must have been almost insufferable husbands. Dickens had as good a conceit of himself as ever Scot desired or prayed for—and genius that can usurp the functions of the critics and calculate the candle-power of its effulgence to a ray more or less must needs be intolerable either at the club or in the home. Byron took advantage of that independence of moral laws which is supposed to be the especial attribute of genius—and indeed (although one need not have any absurd prejudices in favour of morality) he was but a sordid scamp, with a bee in his bonnet and a fluent facile gift of versification. His person, his title, and (above all) his reputation for immorality made his fame and sold his works: and what unholy trinity more powerful than this for popularity?

Bulwer-Lytton was an odious fellow, a ‘curled darling,’ jewelled, scented, and self-centred. He wrote, presumably of himself: ‘Clever men, as a rule, do choose the oddest wives. The cleverer a man is the more easily, I believe, a woman can take him in.’ That, doubtless, was a piece of special pleading on behalf of his own extreme cleverness, for he was the victim of a virago who was the more terrible for being a little less than sane and more than eccentric. He bought her off with an annuity of 400l., but lawsuits directed against him afforded a spice to her life, and persecutions in the form of novels written ‘with a purpose’—the purpose of abusing him—and of public altercations, rendered Lytton’s marriage with Rosina Wheeler one of the most bitterly regretted actions of his life. ‘There were faults on both sides’—to adopt the saying of the gossips: he was irritable and violent, and she was—violent and irritable! Nor was she readily put aside. For years after their separation she never wearied of drawing attention to her wrongs, and it was in 1858, during Lytton’s candidature for Hertford, that she appeared before the hustings on which he was preparing to address the free and enlightened voters, and burst upon his vision, an excited female, dressed in yellow satin and flourishing an umbrella, while she denounced him at the top of her voice as a perjured villain. She was no meek and uncomplaining martyr: she proclaimed her wrongs urbi et orbi, and compelled attention.

Had Coleridge such a wife, his digestion would have been a great deal more disordered than it was used to be in the conjugal difficulties that led him to leave his home. Had Romney been wed to so strenuous a shrew, he had not deserted his wife for over thirty years without some public scandal; and had Tommy Moore espoused any but the most easy-going and long-suffering of wives, his amorous verse would have purchased him many a wigging, I warrant. That modern Anacreon wrote a poem on the origin of woman which would have been impossible to the uxorious, and is sufficient to set the Modern Woman shrieking with indignation. And yet the women of his time delighted in his society! Those verses are, for some unexplained reason, not to be found in the later editions of his works. In them he versifies the Rabbinical theory of woman’s origin—that Adam had a tail, and it was cut off to make Eve. This legend may be found by those who understand Hebrew, and would like to read the original version, in the Talmud; but these are Moore’s lines—

‘They tell us that woman was made of a rib
Just picked from a corner so snug in the side;
But the Rabbins swear to you that this is a fib,
And ’twas not so at all that the sex was supplied.

‘The old Adam was fashioned, the first of his kind,
With a tail like a monkey, full yard and a span;
And when Nature cut off this appendage behind,
Why, then woman was made of the tail of the man.

‘If such is the tie between women and men,
The ninny who weds is a pitiful elf;
For he takes to his tail, like an idiot, again,
And makes a most damnable ape of himself.

‘Yet, if we may judge as the fashion prevails,
Ev’ry husband remembers the original plan,
And, knowing his wife is no more than his tail,
Why, he leaves her behind him as much as he can.’

And certainly Moore left his wife as much as possible, while he hob-nobbed with princes and was the lion of London salons.