and the
object here proposed would be lost, if authors sought to become merely
booksellers.

Whenever the public of Europe shall witness such a new order of men among
their booksellers, they will have less to read, but more to remember.
Their opinions will be less fluctuating, and their knowledge will come to
them with more maturity. Men of letters will fly to the house of the
bookseller who in that class of literature in which he deals, will himself
be not the least eminent member.

CHAPTER XVIII.

The matrimonial state of literature.--Matrimony said not to be well suited
to the domestic life of genius.--Celibacy a concealed cause of the early
querulousness of men of genius.--Of unhappy unions.--Not absolutely
necessary that the wife should be a literary woman.--Of the docility and
susceptibility of the higher female character.--A picture of a literary
wife.

Matrimony has often been considered as a condition not well suited to the
domestic life of genius, accompanied as it must be by many embarrassments
for the head and the heart. It was an axiom with Fuessli, the Swiss
artist, that the marriage state is incompatible with a high cultivation of
the fine arts; and such appears to have been the feeling of most artists.
When MICHAEL ANGELO was asked why he did not marry, he replied, "I have
espoused my art; and it occasions me sufficient domestic cares, for my
works shall be my children. What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had
he not made the gates of St. John? His children consumed his fortune, but
his gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise, remain." The three
Caraccis refused the conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the
interruptions of domestic life. Their crayons and paper were always on
their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they determined never to hurry
over their works in order that they might supply the ceaseless demands of
a family. We discover the same principle operating in our own times. When
a young painter, who had just married, told Sir Joshua that he was
preparing to pursue his studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed,
"Married! then you are ruined as an artist!"

The same principle has influenced literary men. Sir THOMAS BODLEY had a
smart altercation with his first librarian, insisting that he should not
marry, maintaining its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care of
a public library; and Woodward left as one of the express conditions of
his lecturer, t