Michaelmas, and would therefore be composed in October and November,
time enough to allow for the sale of the edition, and the preparation
of the enlarged edition, which came out in February, 1644. But if the
date "August 1" for the first edition be correct, we have to suppose
that Milton was occupying himself with the composition of a vehement
and impassioned argument in favour of divorce for incompatibility of
temper, during the honeymoon! Such behaviour on Milton's part, he
being thirty-five, towards a girl of seventeen, to whom he was bound,
to show all loving tenderness, is so horrible, that a suggestion has
been made that there was a more adequate cause for his displeasure, a
suggestion, which Milton's biographer is bound to notice, even if he
does not adopt it. The suggestion, which I believe was first made by a
writer in the _Athenaeum_, is that Milton's young wife refused him
the consummation of the marriage. The supposition is founded upon a
certain passage in Milton's pamphlet.

If the early date of the pamphlet be the true date; if the _Doctrine
and Discipline_ was in the hands of the public on August 1 if Milton
was brooding over this seething agony of passion all through July,
with the young bride, to whom he had been barely wedded a month, in
the house where he was writing, then the only apology for this outrage
upon the charities, not to say decencies, of home is that which is
suggested by the passage referred to. Then the pamphlet, however
imprudent, becomes pardonable. It is a passionate cry from the depths
of a great despair; another evidence of the noble purity of a nature
which refused to console itself as other men would have consoled
themselves; a nature which, instead of an egotistical whine for its
own deliverance, sets itself to plead the common cause of man and of
society. He gives no intimation of any individual interest, but his
argument throughout glows with a white heat of concealed emotion, such