Could we look into the household during those weeks of wretchedness, we should probably find Milton exceedingly deficient in consideration for the inexperienced girl of half his age, brought from a gay circle of friends and kindred to a grave, studious house.  But it could not well have been otherwise.  Milton was constitutionally unfit “to soothe and fondle,” and his theories cannot have contributed to correct his practice.  His “He for God only, she for God in him,” condenses every fallacy about woman’s true relation to her husband and her Maker.  In his Tractate on Education there is not a word on the education of girls, and yet he wanted an intellectual female companion.  Where should the woman be found at once submissive enough and learned enough to meet such inconsistent exigencies?  It might have been said to him as afterwards to Byron:  “You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.”

If Milton’s first tract on divorce had not been a mere impromptu, extorted by the misery of finding “an image of earth and phlegm” in her “with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome society,” he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and elaborate.  The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at Westminster.  The second edition is far more satisfactory as regards that class of arguments which alone were likely to impress the men of his generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of divines.  In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture and reason, and repudiation of the mediaeval canon law.  It is not here, nevertheless, that Milton is most at home.  The strength of his position is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality or mere expediency.  “His ideal of true and perfect marriage,” says Mr. Ernest Myers, “appeared to him so sacred that he could not admit that considerations of expediency might justify the law in maintaining sacred any meaner kind, or at least any kind in which the vital element of spiritual harmony was not.”  Here he is impregnable and above criticism, but his handling of the more sublunary departments of the subject must be unsatisfactory to legislators, who have usually deemed his sublime idealism fitter for the societies of the blest than for the imperfect communities of mankind.  When his “doctrine and discipline” shall have been sanctioned by lawgivers, we may be sure that the world is already much better, or much worse.