MILTON carried nothing of the greatness of his mind in the choice of his wives. His first wife was the object of sudden fancy. He left the metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married man, and united to a woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the literary habits of the great poet, found his house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a single month's residence! To this circumstance we owe his famous treatise on Divorce; and a party (by no means extinct), who having made as ill choices in their wives, were for divorcing as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves _Miltonists_. When we find that MOLIERE, so skilful in human life, married a girl from his own troop, who made him experience all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarrassments which he himself played off at the theatre; that ADDISON'S fine taste in morals and in life could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself to seek a countess, whom he describes under the stormy character of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and shortened his days; and that STEELE, warm and thoughtless, was united to a cold precise "Miss Prue," as he himself calls her, and from whom he never parted without bickerings; in all these cases we censure the great men, not their wives.[A] ROUSSEAU has honestly confessed his error. He had united himself to a low, illiterate woman; and when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with him. He laments that he had not educated his wife: "In a docile age, I could have adorned her mind with talents and knowledge, which would have more closely united us in retirement. We should not then have felt the intolerable tedium of a tete-a-tete; it is in solitude one feels the advantage of living with another who can think." Thus Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and indicates the right principle. [Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," for anecdotes of "Literary Wives."]