Milton was constitutionally unfit "to soothe and fondle," and his theories cannot have contributed to correct his practice.

His "He for God only, she for God in him," condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and her Maker.

In his Tractate on Education there is not a word on the education of girls, and yet he wanted an intellectual female companion.

Where should the woman be found at once submissive enough and learned enough to meet such inconsistent exigencies?
It might have been said to him as afterwards to Byron: "You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph." If Milton's first tract on divorce had not been a mere impromptu, extorted by the misery of finding "an image of earth and phlegm" in her "with whom he looked to be the co-partner of a sweet and gladsome society," he would certainly have rendered his argument more cogent and elaborate.

The tract, in its inspired portions, is a fine impassioned poem, fitter for the Parliament of Love than the Parliament at Westminster.