te life, naturally incline us to regard him as a man of iron will,
living by rule and reason, and exempt from the sway of passionate
impulse. The incident of his marriage, and not this incident alone,
refutes this conception of his character; his nature was as lyrical and
mobile as a poet's should be. We have seen "Comus" and "Lycidas" arise
at another's bidding, we shall see a casual remark beget "Paradise
Regained." He never attempts to utter his deepest religious convictions
until caught by the contagious enthusiasm of a revolution. If any
incident in his life could ever have compelled him to speak or die it
must have been the humiliating issue of his matrimonial adventure. To be
cast off after a month's trial like an unsatisfactory servant, to
forfeit the hope of sympathy and companionship which had allured him
into the married state, to forfeit it, unless the law could be altered,
for ever! The feelings of any sensitive man must find some sort of
expression in such an emergency. At another period what Milton learned
in suffering would no doubt have been taught in song. But pamphlets were
then the order of the day, and Milton's "Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce," in its first edition, is as much the outpouring of an
overburdened heart as any poem could have been. It bears every mark of a
hasty composition, such as may well have been written and printed within
the last days of July, following Mary Milton's departure. It is short.
It deals with the most obvious aspects of the question. It is meagre in
references and citations; two authors only are somewhat vaguely alleged,
Grotius and Beza. It does not contain the least allusion to his domestic
circumstances, nor anything unless the thesis itself, that could hinder
his wife's return. Everything betokens that it was composed in the
bitterness of wounded feeling upon the incompatibility becoming
manifest; but that he had not yet arrived at the point of demanding the
application of his general principle to his own special case. That point
would be reached when Mary Milton deliberately refused to return, and
the chronology of the greatly enlarged second edition, published in the
following February, entirely confirms Phillips's account. In one point
only he must be wrong. Mary Milton's return to her father's house cannot
have been a voluntary concession on Milton's part, but must have been
wrung from him after bitter contentions. Could we look into the
household during tho