Bulwer-Lytton was an odious fellow, a ‘curled darling,’ jewelled, scented, and self-centred. He wrote, presumably of himself: ‘Clever men, as a rule, do choose the oddest wives. The cleverer a man is the more easily, I believe, a woman can take him in.’ That, doubtless, was a piece of special pleading on behalf of his own extreme cleverness, for he was the victim of a virago who was the more terrible for being a little less than sane and more than eccentric. He bought her off with an annuity of 400_l._, but lawsuits directed against him afforded a spice to her life, and persecutions in the form of novels written ‘with a purpose’--the purpose of abusing him--and of public altercations, rendered Lytton’s marriage with Rosina Wheeler one of the most bitterly regretted actions of his life. ‘There were faults on both sides’--to adopt the saying of the gossips: he was irritable and violent, and she was--violent and irritable! Nor was she readily put aside. For years after their separation she never wearied of drawing attention to her wrongs, and it was in 1858, during Lytton’s candidature for Hertford, that she appeared before the hustings on which he was preparing to address the free and enlightened voters, and burst upon his vision, an excited female, dressed in yellow satin and flourishing an umbrella, while she denounced him at the top of her voice as a perjured villain. She was no meek and uncomplaining martyr: she proclaimed her wrongs _urbi et orbi_, and compelled attention. Had Coleridge such a wife, his digestion would have been a great deal more disordered than it was used to be in the conjugal difficulties that led him to leave his home. Had Romney been wed to so strenuous a shrew, he had not deserted his wife for over thirty years without some public scandal; and had Tommy Moore espoused any but the most easy-going and long-suffering of wives, his amorous verse would have purchased him many a wigging, I warrant. That modern Anacreon wrote a poem on the origin of woman which would have been impossible to the uxorious, and is sufficient to set the Modern Woman shrieking with indignation. And yet the women of his time delighted in his society! Those verses are, for some unexplained reason, not to be found in the later editions of his works. In them he versifies the Rabbinical theory of woman’s origin--that Adam had a tail, and it was cut off to make Eve. This legend may be found by those who understand Hebrew, and would like to read the original version, in the Talmud; but these are Moore’s lines-- ‘They tell us that woman was made of a rib Just picked from a corner so snug in the side; But the Rabbins swear to you that this is a fib, And ’twas not so at all that the sex was supplied. ‘The old Adam was fashioned, the first of his kind, With a tail like a monkey, full yard and a span; And when Nature cut off this appendage behind, Why, then woman was made of the tail of the man.