Matrimony has often been considered as a condition not well suited to the domestic life of genius, accompanied as it must be by many embarrassments for the head and the heart.  It was an axiom with Fuessli, the Swiss artist, that the marriage state is incompatible with a high cultivation of the fine arts; and such appears to have been the feeling of most artists.  When MICHAEL ANGELO was asked why he did not marry, he replied, “I have espoused my art; and it occasions me sufficient domestic cares, for my works shall be my children.  What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had he not made the gates of St. John?  His children consumed his fortune, but his gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise, remain.”  The three Caraccis refused the conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the interruptions of domestic life.  Their crayons and paper were always on their dining-table.  Careless of fortune, they determined never to hurry over their works in order that they might supply the ceaseless demands of a family.  We discover the same principle operating in our own times.  When a young painter, who had just married, told Sir Joshua that he was preparing to pursue his studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed, “Married! then you are ruined as an artist!”

The same principle has influenced literary men.  Sir THOMAS BODLEY had a smart altercation with his first librarian, insisting that he should not marry, maintaining its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care of a public library; and Woodward left as one of the express conditions of his lecturer, that he was not to be a married man.  They imagined that their private affairs would interfere with their public duties.  PEIRESC, the great French collector, refused marriage, convinced that the cares of a family were too absorbing for the freedom necessary to literary pursuits, and claimed likewise a sacrifice of fortune incompatible with his great designs.  BOYLE, who would not suffer his studies to be interrupted by “household affairs,” lived as a boarder with his sister, Lady Ranelagh.  Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, Bayle, and Hobbes, and Hume, and Gibbon, and Adam Smith, decided for celibacy.  These great authors placed their happiness in their celebrity.

This debate, for the present topic has sometimes warmed into one, is in truth ill adapted for controversy.  The heart is more concerned in its issue than any espoused doctrine terminating in partial views.  Look into the domestic annals of genius—­observe the variety of positions into which the literary character is thrown in the nuptial state.  Cynicism will not always obtain a sullen triumph, nor prudence always be allowed to calculate away some of the richer feelings of our nature.  It is not an axiom that literary characters must necessarily institute a new order of celibacy.  The sentence of the apostle pronounces that “the forbidding to marry is a doctrine of devils.”  WESLEY, who published “Thoughts on a Single Life,” advised some “to remain single for the kingdom of heaven’s sake; but the precept,” he adds, “is not for the many.”  So indecisive have been the opinions of the most curious inquirers concerning the matrimonial state, whenever a great destination has engaged their consideration.