The wives of great geniuses, of the inspired among poets, painters, musicians, or _litterateurs_, cannot accompany them in their exaltations of thought or help them in technique; nor, to do those ladies the merest justice, have they often essayed the feat; having been, like the wife of Racine, content to regard their husbands as journeymen who earned their living and kept the household going by the production of so much painted canvas or so many written sheets of paper for which incomprehensible people absurdly gave large sums of money. Racine’s wife made it a stupid boast that she had never read a line of her husband’s verse; Heine’s Parisian grisette never attempted to understand her great man’s genius; and many other wives of genius have remained incapable of understanding the merits or demerits of their husbands’ work. But these comparatively harmless freaks of stupidity and silly lack of appreciation, though mortifying to one’s vanity, were nothing in comparison with such active revolts and exhibitions of termagancy as were indulged in by the wife of Young, author of the _Night Thoughts_, who threw her husband’s manuscripts on the fire, or by Dante’s wife--he had better have remained in celibacy, mourning Beatrice all his life--who gave him some sort of insight to an earthly _Inferno_. She had no notion of allowing him to have his own way in anything, and ‘he had to account for every sigh which he heaved.’ Banishment could not really have harmed him, since his wife remained behind. Sir Thomas More was another unhappy Benedick, if we are to believe the gossips. His first marriage was peaceful enough; but his second, when he married a widow, one Alice Middleton, was all strife and contention. Perhaps, he wrote his _Utopia_, ‘A fruteful and pleasaunt Worke of the beste State of a publyque Weale, and of the newe yle called Utopia,’ as a welcome relief from domestic broils. His conscience would not allow him to recognise the validity of Henry the Eighth’s marriage with Anne Boleyn, and he was cast into the Tower for his pains, presently to be executed on that spot rich in the blood of martyrs for all manner of adequate and inadequate causes--Tower Hill. His wife, with the essentially Jesuitical feminine mind, came daily to where he lay in the Tower and abused him soundly for not giving in his adherence to the King’s wishes. ‘Thou mightest,’ said she, ‘be in thine own house, hadst thou but done as others:’ and I am not sure but what she was in the right; for life is pleasant and self-preservation the whole duty of man. An unruly conscience has been the sole undoing of many a worthy man, both before and since the time of Sir Thomas More. They say that Shakespeare’s was an unhappy wedded life. Ann Hathaway-- ‘She hath a will, she hath a way’-- was twenty-six when he married her, while he was but eighteen. How eloquent, then, this excerpt from _Twelfth Night_--