Warning examples, from Socrates with his shrewish Xanthippe, to the morose and bearish Thomas Carlyle, who rendered his wife’s existence miserable with his acerbity and ill-humours, are frequent throughout the centuries, and sufficient, one might think, to deter Genius from mating with Common-sense, or to hinder Common-sense from running the risks of a lifelong companionship with Genius. And yet artists and literary men, musicians and philosophers, marry after the repeated failures of their predecessors to secure domestic happiness; and women, in their ambition to marry men who show evidences of successful careers in intellectual occupations, have no hesitancy in risking a martyrdom of mental solitude and loneliness that is certainly less directly painful and agonising than the fate of those stalwarts who died for conscience sake, but which is drawn out indefinitely in years of apparent neglect and obvious aloofness from all the interests of their husbands’ lives. But, in considering the unhappy relations that have often existed between the men of genius who have married women of ordinary, or less than ordinary, mental capacity, the indictment must fall far heavier upon the women, because--as will be shown--the active ill-humours and spiteful opposition of their wives have far outweighed the indifference or want of thought of which these men of parts may have been unconsciously guilty in their homes. It is, and has always been, the especial attribute or misfortune of genius that it should be mentally isolated and solitary, impatient of and uncaring for petty domestic details and the sordid cares of housekeeping. Pegasus is a brute transcended beyond the dray-horse that pounds the earth with vibrant hoofs. He soars above the mountain-tops and breathes the rarefied air of the most Alpine heights. He does not go well in double harness and so has no companion on his journeys.