[Footnote 57:  Wife and children, Bacon tells us in one of his Essays, are “impediments to great enterprises;” and adds, “Certainly, the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.”  See, with reference to this subject, chapter xviii. of Mr. D’Israeli’s work on “The Literary Character.”]

[Footnote 58:  Milton’s first wife, it is well known, ran away from him, within a month after their marriage, disgusted, says Phillips, “with his spare diet and hard study;” and it is difficult to conceive a more melancholy picture of domestic life than is disclosed in his nuncupative will, one of the witnesses to which deposes to having heard the great poet himself complain, that his children “were careless of him, being blind, and made nothing of deserting him.”]

[Footnote 59:  By whatever austerity of temper or habits the poets Dante and Milton may have drawn upon themselves such a fate, it might be expected that, at least, the “gentle Shakspeare” would have stood exempt from the common calamity of his brethren.  But, among the very few facts of his life that have been transmitted to us, there is none more clearly proved than the unhappiness of his marriage.  The dates of the birth of his children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford,—­the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards,—­all prove beyond a doubt both his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close of it.

In endeavouring to argue against the conclusion naturally to be deduced from this will, Boswell, with a strange ignorance of human nature, remarks:—­“If he had taken offence at any part of his wife’s conduct, I cannot believe that he would have taken this petty mode of expressing it.”]

[Footnote 60:  In a small book which I have in my possession, containing a sort of chronological History of the Ring, I find the name of Lord Byron, more than once, recorded among the “backers.”]

[Footnote 61:  Dr. Woolriche, an old and valued friend of mine, to whose skill, on the occasion here alluded to, I was indebted for my life.]

* * * * *

LETTER. 207.  TO MR. MURRAY.

     “December 31, 1814.

     “A thousand thanks for Gibbon:  all the additions are very great
     improvements.

“At last I must be most peremptory with you about the print from Phillips’s picture:  it is pronounced on all hands the most stupid and disagreeable possible:  so do, pray, have a new engraving, and let me see it first; there really must be no more from the same plate.  I don’t much care, myself; but every one I honour torments me to death about it, and abuses it to a degree beyond repeating.  Now, don’t answer with excuses; but, for my sake, have it destroyed:  I never shall have peace