With his third wife he seems to have lived happily; the young wife devoted herself to his necessities--for he was now blind--"in darkness, and with dangers compassed round, and solitude." DR. RICHARD HOOKER, was very unfortunate in his wife. He was betrayed into marrying her by his extraordinary simplicity and ignorance of the world. The circumstances connected with the marriage were these: Having been appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross, he went up to London from Oxford, and proceeded to the house set apart for the reception of the preachers. He was very wet and weary on his arrival, and experienced much kindness from the housekeeper. She persuaded him that he was a man of very tender constitution, and urged that he ought, above all things, to have a wife, to nurse and take care of him. She professed to be able to furnish him with such, if he thought fit to marry. Hooker authorized her to select a wife for him, and the artful woman presented her own daughter--"a silly, clownish woman, and withal a mere Xantippe." Hooker, who had promised to marry whomsoever she should select, thought himself bound to marry her, and he did so. They led a most uncomfortable life, but he resigned himself as he best could, lamenting that "saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life." When Cranmer and Sandys went to see him at his rectory in Buckinghamshire, they found him reading Horace and tending sheep, in the absence of the servant. When they were conversing with him in the house, his wife would break in upon them, and call him away to rock the cradle and perform other menial offices. The guests were glad to get away. This unfortunate wife was long a thorn in his side. The famous Earl of ROCHESTER appears in very favorable light in his letters to his wife: they are remarkably tender, affectionate, and gentle. In one of them, he says: "'Tis not an easy thing to be entirely happy; but to be kind is very easy, and that is the greatest measure of happiness. I say not this to put you in mind of being kind to me--you have practised that so long, that I have a joyful confidence you will never forget it--but to show that I myself have a sense of what the method of my life seemed so utterly to contradict." DRYDEN married Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. The match added little to his wealth, and less to his happiness. It was an altogether unhappy union. On one occasion, his wife wished to be a book, that she might enjoy more of his company. Dryden's reply was: "Be an almanac, then, my dear, that I may change you once a year." In his writings afterwards, he constantly inveighed against matrimony.