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should not yet be in force, being wholly as needful, I know "not what can be in cause but senseless cruelty. But yet to say divorce was granted for relief of wives, rather than for "husbands, is but weakly conjectured, and is manifest the "extreme shift of a huddled exposition. . . . . Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created "for man, and not man for woman, and that a husband may "be injured as insufferably in marriage as a wife. What an "injury is it after wedlock not to be beloved, what to be

slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule "who shall be the head, not for any parity of wisdom (for "that were something reasonable), but out of a female pride! "I suffer not,' saith Saint Paul, 'the woman to usurp autho"rity over the man.' If the Apostle could not suffer it, into "what mould is he mortified that can? Solomon saith that a bad wife is to her husband as rottenness to his bones, a continual dropping: better dwell in a corner of the house"top, or in the wilderness, than with such a one: whoso "hideth her hideth the wind, and one of the four mischiefs that the earth cannot bear.' If the Spirit of God wrote such " aggravations as these, and, as it may be guessed by these Isimilitudes, counsels the man rather to divorce than to live "with such a colleague, and yet, on the other side, expresses nothing of the wife's suffering with a bad husband, is it not "most likely that God in his Law had more pity towards "man thus wedlocked than towards the woman that was "created for another?" Here was doctrine with a vengeance. Man being the superior being, and therefore with the greater capacity of being pained or injured, God had pitied him, if unhappily married, more than the woman similarly situated. For him, therefore, and not for the woman, there had been provided the right of divorce! This is not positively asserted, but it seems to be implied.

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1 This passage occurs in the second edition. There is but the germ of it in the first edition, in the form of the first sentence, "If Divorce were granted

senseless cruelty." The inference is that Milton, when he wrote the first edition, was rather pleased with the

The woman's relief, in the case

idea of Beza and Paræus that divorce had been given for the relief of the wife, and that his dissatisfaction with the idea, as promoting the woman too much at the man's expense, came afterwards.

of a marriage unhappy for her, consisted apparently, according to Milton, not in her power to cut the knot, but in the likelihood that her husband, finding the marriage unhappy also for him, would desire for his own sake to cut the knot, or might be driven by her management to that extremity. In short, we have here, as another consequence of Milton's unfortunate marriage, the beginning of that peculiarly stern form of the notion of woman's natural and essential inferiority to man which ran with visible effects through his whole subsequent life. If not his ideal of woman, at least his estimate of what was to be expected from actual women, and what was on the average to be accorded to them, had been permanently lowered by a bad first experience.

All this while, what of the-poor girl whose hard fate it was to occasion this experience in the life of a man too grandly and sternly her superior? One is bound to think also of her, and to remember, in so thinking, how young she was at the time when her offended husband first theorized his feeling of her defects, and published his theorizings, with her image and memory, though not with her name, involved in them, to the talkative world. She had not been seventeen years and a half old when she had married Milton; she was of exactly that age when she left him, and the first edition of his Divorce Treatise was ready; she was just eighteen when the second and fuller edition appeared. Surely, but for that fatal visit back to Forest Hill, contrived by her or her relatives, matters would have righted themselves. As it was, things could not be worse. Restored to her father's house at Forest Hill, amid her unmarried brothers and sisters, and all the familiar objects from which she had parted so recently on going to London, the young bride had, doubtless, her little pamphlets to publish in that narrow but sympathising circle. In particular, her grievances would be poured into the confiding ears of her mother. That lady, as we can see, at once takes the lead in the case. Never with her will shall her daughter go back to that dreadful man in Aldersgate Street! Mr. Powell acquiesces; brothers and sisters acquiesce; Oxford

Royalism near at hand acquiesces, so far as it is consulted; the bride herself acquiesces, happy enough again in the routine of home, or perhaps beginning to join bashfully again in such gaieties of officers' balls, and the like, as the proximity of the King's quarters to Forest Hill made inevitable. And is not the King's cause on the whole prospering, and is not that in itself another reason for being at least in no hurry to make it up with Milton? What if it never be made up with him? It is some time since his letters to Forest Hill by the carrier ceased entirely, and since the foot-messenger he sent down expressly all the way from London with his final letter was met at the gate by Mrs. Powell and told her mind in terms which were doubtless duly reported. And now, they hear, he is going about London as usual, and visiting at Lady Margaret Ley's, and giving his own version of his marriage story, and even printing Tracts in favour of Divorce! People generally, they say, are not agreeing with him on that subject; but there is at least one respectable English family that is tempted to agree with him and to wish him all success!

BOOK II.

MARCH 1644-MARCH 1645.

HISTORY: THE YEAR OF MARSTON MOOR: CIVIL WAR, LONG PARLIAMENT, AND WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY CONTINUEDSTRUGGLE OF INDEPENDENCY WITH PRESBYTERIANISM: TOLERATION CONTROVERSY ENGLISH SECTS AND SECTARIES-PRESBYTERIAN SETTLEMENT VOTED-NEW MODEL OF THE ARMY.

BIOGRAPHY:-MILTON AMONG THE SECTARIES: HIS SECOND DIVORCE PAMPHLET, TRACT ON EDUCATION, AREOPAGITICA TETRACHORDON, AND COLASTERION.