Lacon in Council was published in 1865 by John Frederick Boyes (1811-1879), English scholar of classics.

Unhappy Marriages Among Men of Genius

UNHAPPY MARRIAGES AMONG MEN OF GENIUS. - The rare concurrence of genius with domestic comfort is perfectly awful. Take Dante, the exile, who left his wife never wishing to see her more; take Tasso, wifeless; Petrarch, wifeless; Ariosto, wifeless; Milton, thrice married, but only once with much comfort; Draden, wedded, like Addison, to a title and discord; Young lives alone till past fifty; Swift’s marriage is no marriage; Sterne’s, Churchill’s, Baron’s, Coleridge’s marriages, broken and unhappy. Then we have a set of celibates – Herrick, Cowley, Pope, Thomson, Prior, Gay, Shenstone, Gray, Akenside, Goldsmith, Collins, Cowper, and I know not how many more of our best poets. Johnson had a wife, loved, and soon lost her. It is almost enough to make women tremble at the idea of allying themselves with genius, or giving birth to it. Take the philosophers – Bacon, like his famous legal adversary, Coke, seems to have enjoyed little domestic comfort and speaks, for, as he says, “certain grave reason,” disapprovingly of his partner. Our metaphysicians – Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Butler – are as solitary as Spinosa and Kant. The celibate philosopher Hume conducts us to the other great bachelor historians – Gibbon and Macaulay; as Bishop Butler does to some of the princes of English divinity – Hooker cajoled into marrying a shrew. Chillingworth unmarried, Hammong unmarried, Leighton unmarried, Barrow also single. I only take foremost men; the list might be swelled with monarchs and generals in marriage.

Lacon in Council.