he avaricious passion
of his wife should not be able to resist the offers she received to poison
him, and he was compelled to provide and dress his own food. It is
believed that he died of poison. What a picture has Passeri left of the
domestic interior of this great artist! _Cosi fra mille crepacuori mori
uno de' piu eccellenti artefici del mundo; che oltre al suo valore
pittorico avrebbe piu d'ogni altri maritato di viver sempre per l'onesta
personale._ "So perished, amidst a thousand heart-breakings, the most
excellent of artists; who besides his worth as a painter, deserved as much
as any one to have lived for his excellence as a man."

MILTON carried nothing of the greatness of his mind in the choice of his
wives. His first wife was the object of sudden fancy. He left the
metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married man, and united to a
woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened at
the literary habits of the great poet, found his house solitary, beat
his nephews, and ran away after a single month's residence! To this
circumstance we owe his famous treatise on Divorce; and a party (by no
means extinct), who having made as ill choices in their wives, were for
divorcing as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves
_Miltonists_.

When we find that MOLIERE, so skilful in human life, married a girl from
his own troop, who made him experience all those bitter disgusts and
ridiculous embarrassments which he himself played off at the theatre; that
ADDISON'S fine taste in morals and in life could suffer the ambition of a
courtier to prevail with himself to seek a countess, whom he describes
under the stormy character of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously
into solitude, and shortened his days; and that STEELE, warm and
thoughtless, was united to a cold precise "Miss Prue," as he himself calls
her, and from whom he never parted without bickerings; in all these cases
we censure the great men, not their wives.[A] ROUSSEAU has honestly
confessed his error. He had united himself to a low, illiterate woman; and
when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with
him. He laments that he had not educated his wife: "In a docile age, I
could have adorned her mind with talents and knowledge, which would have
more closely united us in retirement. We should not then have felt the
intolerable tedium of a tete-a-tete; it is in solitude one feels the
advantage of living w