Well, there follows a year or more of this coupled life--with what clashings we can imagine. Old Ralph Milbanke is not there to drawl through his after-dinner stories, and to intrude his restraining presence. The poet finds things to watch about the clubs and the theatres--quite other than the stunted gooseberries that grew in his father-in-law’s garden. Nothing is more sure than that the wilful audacities, and selfishness, and temper of the poet, put my lady’s repose and dignities and perfection to an awful strain. Nor is it to be wondered at, if the mad and wild indiscretions of the husband should have provoked some quiet and galling counter indiscretions on the part of her ladyship. It is alleged, for instance, that on an early occasion--and at the suggestion of a lady companion of the august mistress--there was an inspection of my lord’s private papers, and a sending home to their writers of certain highly perfumed notelets found therein; and we can readily believe that when this instance of wifely zeal came to his lordship’s knowledge he broke into a strain of remark which was _not_ precisely that of the “Hebrew Melodies.” Doubtless he carries away from such encounter a great reserve of bottled wrath--not so much against her ladyship personally, as against the stolid proprieties, the unbending scruples, the lady-like austerities, and the cool, elegant dowager-dignities she represents. Fancy a man who has put such soul as he has, and such strength and hope and pride as he has, into those swift poems, which have taken his heart’s blood to their making--fancy him, asked by the woman who has set out to widen his hopes and life by all the helps of wifehood, “_When--pray--he means to give up those versifying habits of his?_” No, I do not believe he resented this in language. I don’t believe he argued the point; I don’t believe he made defence of versifying habits; but I imagine that he regarded her with a dazed look, and an eye that saw more than it seemed to see--an eye that discerned broad shallows in her, where he had hoped for pellucid depths. I think he felt then--if never before--a premonition that their roads would not lie long together. And yet it gave him a shock--not altogether a pleasant one, we may be sure--when Sir Ralph, the father-in-law, to whose house she had gone on a visit, wrote him politely to the effect that--“she would never come back.” Such things cannot be pleasant; at least, I should judge not.