have
been quite unaccustomed to the not very pleasant scene in which she
found herself. Still, many young ladies have married schoolmasters,
and many young ladies have gone from Oxfordshire to London; and
nevertheless, no such dissolution of matrimonial harmony is known to
have occurred.

The fact we believe to be, that the bride took a dislike to her
husband. We cannot but have a suspicion that she did not like him
before marriage, and that pecuniary reasons had their influence. If,
however, Mr. Powell exerted his paternal influence, it may be admitted
that he had unusual considerations to advance in favor of the alliance
he proposed. It is not every father whose creditors are handsome young
gentlemen with fair incomes. Perhaps it seemed no extreme tyranny to
press the young lady a little to do that which some others might have
done without pressing. Still all this is but hypothesis: our evidence
as to the love affairs of the time of King Charles I. is but meager.
But whatever the feelings of Miss Powell may have been, those of Mrs.
Milton are exceedingly certain. She would not return to her husband;
she did not answer his letters; and a messenger whom he sent to bring
her back was handled rather roughly. Unquestionably she was deeply to
blame, by far the most to blame of the two. Whatever may be alleged
against him is as nothing compared with her offense in leaving him. To
defend so startling a course, we must adopt views of divorce even more
extreme than those which Milton was himself driven to inculcate; and
whatever Mrs. Milton's practice may have been, it may be fairly
conjectured that her principles were strictly orthodox. Yet if she
could be examined by a commission to the ghosts, she would probably
have some palliating circumstances to allege in mitigation of judgment.
There were perhaps peculiarities in Milton's character which a young
lady might not improperly dislike. The austere and ascetic character
is of course far less agreeable to women than the sensuous and
susceptible. The self-occupation, the pride, the abstraction of the
former are to the female mind disagreeable; studious habits and unusual
self-denial seem to it purposeless; lofty enthusiasm, public spirit,
the solitary pursuit of an elevated ideal, are quite out of its way:
they rest too little on the visible world to be intelligible, they are
too little suggested by the daily occurrences of life to seem possible.
The poet in searc