sen to go through without falling speedily into
_the greatest disorders_, and it might be _imbecility itself_. This is not
colouring, but the exact plain truth."

Poor moralist, and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets.

Assuredly it would not have been a question whether these literary
characters should have married, had not MONTAIGNE, when a widower,
declared that "he would not marry a second time, though it were Wisdom
itself;" but the airy Gascon has not disclosed how far _Madame_ was
concerned in this anathema.

If the literary man unite himself to a woman whose taste and whose temper
are adverse to his pursuits, he must courageously prepare for a martyrdom.
Should a female mathematician be united to a poet, it is probable that she
would be left amidst her abstractions, to demonstrate to herself how many
a specious diagram fails when brought into its mechanical operation; or
discovering the infinite varieties of a curve, she might take occasion to
deduce her husband's versatility. If she become as jealous of his books as
other wives might be of his mistresses, she may act the virago even over
his innocent papers. The wife of Bishop COOPER, while her husband was
employed on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume of many years to the
flames, and obliged that scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a
second Lexicon. The wife of WHITELOCKE often destroyed his MSS., and
the marks of her nails have come down to posterity in the numerous
_lacerations_ still gaping in his "Memorials." The learned Sir HENRY
SAVILLE, who devoted more than half his life and nearly ten thousand
pounds to his magnificent edition of St. Chrysostom, led a very uneasy
life between the saint and her ladyship. What with her tenderness for him,
and her own want of amusement, Saint Chrysostom, it appears, incurred more
than one danger.

Genius has not preserved itself from the errors and infirmities of
matrimonial connexions. The energetic character of DANTE could neither
soften nor control the asperity of his lady; and when that great poet
lived in exile, she never cared to see him more, though he was the father
of her six children. The internal state of the house of DOMENICHINO
afflicted that great artist with many sorrows. He had married a beauty of
high birth and extreme haughtiness, and of the most avaricious
disposition. When at Naples he himself dreaded lest t