den, is a deal more touching than the scholar's wail about "the silent and
insensate" wife. The girl was being deprived of the rollicking freedom to
which she had been used, but the great man was waking the echoes with his
wail for a companionship he had never known.

Yet the girl was shrewd. All women are shrewd, I am told, and some are
wise and some are not; and many women there be who consider finesse an
improvement on frankness. At the end of a month, Milton's wife contrived
to have her parents send for her to return home on a visit that was to
last only until come Michaelmas. But Michaelmas arrived and the young
bride refused to return, sending back saucy answers to the great author of
"Il Penseroso."

In the meantime Milton wrote pamphlets urging that divorce should be
granted on the grounds of incompatibility, and pronouncing as inhuman the
laws that gave freedom from marital woes on no less ignoble grounds than
that a man should violate his honor.

There is pretty good evidence that a part of Milton's argument on the
subject of divorce was written out while his wife was under his roof. This
reveals a slight lack of delicacy as well as the author's habit to make
copy out of his private griefs; but it must be granted that Milton goes to
the very bottom of the subject, even to stating the fact that those
happily married have neither pity nor patience with those mismated. "If
you want sympathy," he says, "you must go to those who are regarded as not
respectable," Any man who writes on philosophy can find his every cue in
Plato, and he who discusses divorce from a radical standpoint can find
himself anticipated by Milton in the Seventeenth Century. Every view is
taken, even down to the suggestion of a probationary marriage, which
Milton thought might come about when civilization had ceased to crawl and