How little, then, did Milton deserve the Paradise of which he wrote, for he was married no less than three times, and that, too, after the unpleasant experiences of his first alliance. Mary Powell, his first wife, was a shrew. She was the daughter of an Oxfordshire Royalist, and, disgusted and alarmed at the severity with which Milton, who was then a dominie, treated the boys under his charge, she left him after the honeymoon and returned home. For three years she kept apart, paying no attention to his requests for her to return, and she only rejoined him after Naseby, when, the Royalist hopes being shattered, it seemed advisable that she and her people should seek the shelter that the roof of so uncompromising a Puritan afforded. He received her, and for the remaining fifteen years she made his life miserable. Addison made a great social triumph for eighteenth-century literature when he married the widowed Countess of Warwick, but in doing so he sowed the whirlwind for his own reaping. Her arrogance was monumental, and she made her stately house at Kensington so unbearable to him, that he was used to fly her presence and take refuge in a little country tavern that stood in those days on the high road to London, at the corner of a lane which is now the Earl’s Court Road. Domestic strife drove him to the bottle, and the ‘Spectator’ died ‘like a Christian,’ indeed, but with an intellect clouded by drink. In more recent times, the marriages of Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dickens were notoriously unhappy; but, certainly, these three men of genius must have been almost insufferable husbands. Dickens had as good a conceit of himself as ever Scot desired or prayed for--and genius that can usurp the functions of the critics and calculate the candle-power of its effulgence to a ray more or less must needs be intolerable either at the club or in the home. Byron took advantage of that independence of moral laws which is supposed to be the especial attribute of genius--and indeed (although one need not have any absurd prejudices in favour of morality) he was but a sordid scamp, with a bee in his bonnet and a fluent facile gift of versification. His person, his title, and (above all) his reputation for immorality made his fame and sold his works: and what unholy trinity more powerful than this for popularity?