Milton exceedingly deficient in consideration for the inexperienced girl
of half his age, brought from a gay circle of friends and kindred to a
grave, studious house. But it could not well have been otherwise. Milton
was constitutionally unfit "to soothe and fondle," and his theories
cannot have contributed to correct his practice. His "He for God only,
she for God in him," condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation
to her husband and her Maker. In his Tractate on Education there is not
a word on the education of girls, and yet he wanted an intellectual
female companion. Where should the woman be found at once submissive
enough and learned enough to meet such inconsistent exigencies? It might
have been said to him as afterwards to Byron: "You talk like a
Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in
the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe
for not containing a sylph."

If Milton's first tract on divorce had not been a mere impromptu,
extorted by the misery of finding "an image of earth and phlegm" in her
"with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome
society," he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and
elaborate. The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned
poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at
Westminster. The second edition is far more satisfactory as regards that
class of arguments which alone were likely to impress the men of his
generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of
divines. In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers
will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture
and reason, and repudiation of the mediæval canon law. It is not here,
nevertheless, that Milton is most at home. The strength of his position
is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he
discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality