MILTON carried nothing of the greatness of his mind in the choice of his wives.  His first wife was the object of sudden fancy.  He left the metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married man, and united to a woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the literary habits of the great poet, found his house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a single month’s residence!  To this circumstance we owe his famous treatise on Divorce; and a party (by no means extinct), who having made as ill choices in their wives, were for divorcing as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves Miltonists.

When we find that MOLIERE, so skilful in human life, married a girl from his own troop, who made him experience all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarrassments which he himself played off at the theatre; that ADDISON’S fine taste in morals and in life could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself to seek a countess, whom he describes under the stormy character of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and shortened his days; and that STEELE, warm and thoughtless, was united to a cold precise “Miss Prue,” as he himself calls her, and from whom he never parted without bickerings; in all these cases we censure the great men, not their wives.[A] ROUSSEAU has honestly confessed his error.  He had united himself to a low, illiterate woman; and when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with him.  He laments that he had not educated his wife:  “In a docile age, I could have adorned her mind with talents and knowledge, which would have more closely united us in retirement.  We should not then have felt the intolerable tedium of a tete-a-tete; it is in solitude one feels the advantage of living with another who can think.”  Thus Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and indicates the right principle.

[Footnote A:  See “Curiosities of Literature,” for anecdotes of “Literary Wives.”]

Yet it seems not absolutely necessary for the domestic happiness of the literary character, that his wife should be a literary woman.  TYCHO BRAHE, noble by birth as well as genius, married the daughter of a peasant.  By which means that great man obtained two points essential for his abstract pursuits; he acquired an obedient wife, and freed himself of his noble relatives, who would no longer hold an intercourse with the man who was spreading their family honours into more ages than perhaps they could have traced them backwards.  The lady of WIELAND was a pleasing domestic person, who, without reading her husband’s works, knew he was a great poet.  Wieland was apt to exercise his imagination in declamatory invectives and bitter amplifications; and the writer of this account, in perfect German taste, assures us, “that many of his felicities of diction were thus struck out at a heat.”  During this frequent operation of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs. Wieland overcame the orgasm of the German bard, merely by persisting in her admiration and her patience.  When the burst was over, Wieland himself was so charmed by her docility, that he usually closed with giving up all his opinions.