The executive functions of love-making are best carried on by shallow people; so mediocre women often show rare skill in courtship, and sometimes succeed in bagging big game.  But surely Mary Powell had no conception of the greatness of Milton’s intellect—­she only knew that he was handsome, and her parents said he was rich.

There was feasting and mirth when Milton arrived back in town accompanied by his bride and various of her kinsmen.  In all marriage festivals there is something pathetically absurd, and I never see a sidewalk awning spread without thinking of the one erected for John Milton and Mary Powell, who were led through it by an Erebus that was not only blind, but stone-deaf.

John Milton was an ascetic, and lived in a realm of reverie and dreams; his wife had a strong bias toward the voluptuous, reveling in a world of sense, and demanding attention as her right.  Milton began diving into his theories and books, and forgot the poor child who had no abstract world into which to withdraw.  Suddenly bereft of the gay companionship that her father’s house supplied, she felt herself aggrieved, alone; and tears of vexation and homesickness began to stream down her pretty cheeks.

When summoned into her husband’s presence she had nothing to say, and Milton, the theorist, discovered that what he had mistaken for the natural reticence and bashfulness of maidenhood was mere inanity and lack of ideas.  But the loneliness of the poor country girl, shut up in a student’s den, is a deal more touching than the scholar’s wail about “the silent and insensate” wife.  The girl was being deprived of the rollicking freedom to which she had been used, but the great man was waking the echoes with his wail for a companionship he had never known.

Yet the girl was shrewd.  All women are shrewd, I am told, and some are wise and some are not; and many women there be who consider finesse an improvement on frankness.  At the end of a month, Milton’s wife contrived to have her parents send for her to return home on a visit that was to last only until come Michaelmas.  But Michaelmas arrived and the young bride refused to return, sending back saucy answers to the great author of “Il Penseroso.”

In the meantime Milton wrote pamphlets urging that divorce should be granted on the grounds of incompatibility, and pronouncing as inhuman the laws that gave freedom from marital woes on no less ignoble grounds than that a man should violate his honor.

There is pretty good evidence that a part of Milton’s argument on the subject of divorce was written out while his wife was under his roof.  This reveals a slight lack of delicacy as well as the author’s habit to make copy out of his private griefs; but it must be granted that Milton goes to the very bottom of the subject, even to stating the fact that those happily married have neither pity nor patience with those mismated.  “If you want sympathy,” he says, “you must go to those who are regarded as not respectable,” Any man who writes on philosophy can find his every cue in Plato, and he who discusses divorce from a radical standpoint can find himself anticipated by Milton in the Seventeenth Century.  Every view is taken, even down to the suggestion of a probationary marriage, which Milton thought might come about when civilization had ceased to crawl and begun to walk.