Michelangelo said, "I have more than enough of a wife in my art." Among celibates may be mentioned also: Kant, Newton, Pitt, Fox, Fontenelle, Beethoven, Gassendi, Galilco, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Bayle, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopen- hauer, Camoëns, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Foscolo, Alfieri, Cavour, Pellico, Mazzini, Aleardi, Guerrazzi. And among women: Florence Nightingale, Catherine Stanley, Gaetana Agnesi (the mathematician), and Luigia Laura Bassi. A very large number of married men of genius have not been happy in marriage: Shakespeare, Dante, Marzolo, Byron, Coleridge, Addison, Landor, Carlyle, Ary Scheffer, Rovani, A. Comte, Haydn, Milton, Sterne, Dickens, &c. St. Paul boasted of his absolute eontinence; Cavendish altogether lacked the sexual instinct, and had a morbid antipathy to Flaubert wrote to George Sand: "The muse, however intractable, gives fewer sorrows than woman. cannot reeoncile one with the other. One must choose.”[1] Adam Smith said he reserved his gallantry for his books. Chamfort, the misanthrope, wrote: “If men followed the guidance of reason no one would marry; for my own part, I will have nothing to do with it, lest I should have a son like myself.” A French poet has said:
Unlikeness to Parents.—Nearly all men of genius have differed as much from their fathers as from their mothers (Foscolo, Michelangelo, Giotto, Haydn, &c.). That is one of the marks of degeneration. For this reason one notes physical resemblances between men of genius belonging to very different races and epochs; for example, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Giovanni of the Black Bands; or Casti, Sterne, and Voltaire. They often differ from their national type. They differ by the possession of noble and almost superhuman characters (elevation of the forehead, notable development of the
