fact that those
happily married have neither pity nor patience with those mismated. "If
you want sympathy," he says, "you must go to those who are regarded as not
respectable," Any man who writes on philosophy can find his every cue in
Plato, and he who discusses divorce from a radical standpoint can find
himself anticipated by Milton in the Seventeenth Century. Every view is
taken, even down to the suggestion of a probationary marriage, which
Milton thought might come about when civilization had ceased to crawl and
begun to walk.

One seeks in vain to learn if the unhappy wife of Milton ever read her
husband's bitter tracts. It is probable she never did, and would not have
comprehended their import if she had; and it is still more likely that she
never came to realize that she was wedded to the greatest man of the age.
A truce was patched up, on the bankruptcy of her father, and she came back
penitent, and was taken into favor. Not only did she come back, but she
brought her family; and the ravenous Royalists consumed the substance of
the spiritual and ascetic Puritan.

Had Milton then died, it is probable that the gladsome widow would have
been consoled and married again very shortly, just as did the widows of
Van Dyck and Rubens--not knowing that to have been the wife of a king was
honor enough for one woman.

But after fifteen years of domestic "neglect," during which she doubtless
benefited her husband by stirring in him a noble discontent, she passed
from earth; and it was left for John Milton to repeat twice more his
marital venture, with a similar result. And in this, Fate sends back a
fact that leers like Mephistopheles, by way of answer to Milton's
pamphlets on divorce: Why should the State grant a divorce, when great men
refuse to learn by experience, and, given the opportunity, only repeat the
blunders they have already made?

* * * * *

God in His goodness has in certain instances sent great men angels of
light for assistants--mates who could comprehend and sympathize with their
ideals. But it is expecting too much to suppose that Nature can look out
for such a trifle as that the right man should marry the right woman.
Nature possibly never considered a time-contract, and she is a careless
jade, anyway. She moves blindly along with never a thought for the
individual.

Audubon the naturalist records that one-third of all birds hatched tumble
out of the nest before they c