to him, and his date, as Professor Masson discovered, is August 1.  Must we believe that Phillips’s account is a misrepresentation?  Must we, in Pattison’s words, “suppose that Milton was occupying himself with a vehement and impassioned argument in favour of divorce for incompatibility of temper, during the honeymoon”?  It would certainly seem so, and if Milton is to be vindicated it can only be by attention to traits in his character, invisible on its surface, but plainly discoverable in his actions.

The grandeur of Milton’s poetry, and the dignity and austerity of his private life, naturally incline us to regard him as a man of iron will, living by rule and reason, and exempt from the sway of passionate impulse.  The incident of his marriage, and not this incident alone, refutes this conception of his character; his nature was as lyrical and mobile as a poet’s should be.  We have seen “Comus” and “Lycidas” arise at another’s bidding, we shall see a casual remark beget “Paradise Regained.”  He never attempts to utter his deepest religious convictions until caught by the contagious enthusiasm of a revolution.  If any incident in his life could ever have compelled him to speak or die it must have been the humiliating issue of his matrimonial adventure.  To be cast off after a month’s trial like an unsatisfactory servant, to forfeit the hope of sympathy and companionship which had allured him into the married state, to forfeit it, unless the law could be altered, for ever!  The feelings of any sensitive man must find some sort of expression in such an emergency.  At another period what Milton learned in suffering would no doubt have been taught in song.  But pamphlets were then the order of the day, and Milton’s “Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” in its first edition, is as much the outpouring of an overburdened heart as any poem could have been.  It bears every mark of a hasty composition, such as may well have been written and printed within the last days of July, following Mary Milton’s departure.  It is short.  It deals with the most obvious aspects of the question.  It is meagre in references and citations; two authors only are somewhat vaguely alleged, Grotius and Beza.  It does not contain the least allusion to his domestic circumstances, nor anything unless the thesis itself, that could hinder his wife’s return.  Everything betokens that it was composed in the bitterness of wounded feeling upon the incompatibility becoming manifest; but that he had not yet arrived at the point of demanding the application of his general principle to his own special case.  That point would be reached when Mary Milton deliberately refused to return, and the chronology of the greatly enlarged second edition, published in the following February, entirely confirms Phillips’s account.  In one point only he must be wrong.  Mary Milton’s return to her father’s house cannot have been a voluntary concession on Milton’s part, but must have been wrung from him after bitter contentions.