re another evidence of the transparency of his
mind. In looking through his prose works you see traces of all that was
engaging his imagination and thought at the time. Poetry is the highest
of expressive arts; and poets are the worst dissemblers or economisers of
truth in the world. Their knowledge, like their feeling, possesses them,
and must find expression as argument, or illustration, or figure,
whatever the immediate matter in hand. The prose works of Milton are
thus, from first to last, an exposition of himself. The divorce
pamphlets, especially, are hot with smothered personal feeling. Long
years afterwards, when time and change had softened and blurred it in
memory, his early misadventure was reflected in more than one passage of
the later poems. The humble plaint of Eve, and the description of her
reunion with her alienated lord, in the Tenth Book of _Paradise Lost_,
doubtless contains, as has often been said, some reflection of what took
place at a similar interview in 1645, when Mistress Mary Milton returned
to her offended husband. That one principal cause of the rupture has been
rightly divined, by Mr. Mark Pattison and others, is probable from
certain remarkable lines in the Eighth Book, where Adam describes how he
was presented with his bride:--

On she came,
Led by her Heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice, nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites.

Even at so wide a remove of time, the poet's wounded pride finds
expression in this singular theory--or, rather, in this more than dubious
piece of self-justification.

But although the hurt he had suffered, in his most susceptible feelings,
gives eloquence and plangency to his divorce pamphlets, it was not merely
to voice his sufferings that he wrote those pamphlets. Most men in
Milton's position, married to "a nothing, a desertrice, an adversary,"
would have recognised that theirs was one of those exceptional cases for
which the law cannot provide, and would have sat down under their unhappy
chance, to bear it or mitigate it as best they might. Some poets of the
time of the Romantic Revival would have claimed the privilege of genius
to be a law unto itself; the law of the State being designed for the
common rout, whose lesser sensibilities and weaker individuality make
them amenable to its discipline. Milton did neither the one thing nor the
other. The modern idolatry of genius was as yet uninve