THE READER IS REMINDED OF PRINCE ABINO JASSIMA AND THE FOX-LADY. GENT
NOT LIKE JOB, NOR MRS. GENT LIKE JOB'S WIFE.
_A me parrebbe a la storia far torto,
S' io non aggiungo qualche codicillo;
Acciò che ognun chi legge, benedica
L' ultimo effetto de la mia fatica._
PULCI.
I cannot think so meanly of my gentle readers as to suppose that any
of them can have forgotten the story of the Japanese Prince Abino
Jassima, and the gradual but lamentable metamorphosis of his beautiful
wife. But perhaps it may not have occurred to them that many a poor
man, and without any thing miraculous in the case, finds himself in
the same predicament,—except that when he discovers his wife to be a
vixen he is not so easily rid of her.
Let me not be suspected of insinuating that Alice Gent, formerly
Bourne, formerly Guy, proved to be a wife of this description, for
which, I know not wherefore, an appellation has been borrowed from the
she-fox. Her husband who found that ten years had wrought a great
change in her appearance, complained indeed of other changes. “I
found,” he says, “her temper much altered from that sweet natural
softness and most tender affection that rendered her so amiable to me
while I was more juvenile and she a maiden. Not less sincere I must
own; but with that presumptive air and conceited opinion (like Mrs.
Day in the play of the Committee) which made me imagine an epidemical
distemper prevailed among the good women to ruin themselves and
families, or if not prevented by Divine Providence to prove the sad
cause of great contention and of disquietude. However as I knew I was
but then a novice in the intricate laws of matrimony, and that nothing
but a thorough annihilation can disentangle or break that chain which
often produces a strange concatenation for future disorders, I
endeavoured to comply with a sort of stoical resolution to some very
harsh rules that otherwise would have grated my human understanding.
For as by this change I had given a voluntary wound to my wonted
liberty, now attacked in the maintenance partly of pretended friends,
spunging parasites, and flatterers who imposed on good nature to our
great damage; so in this conjugal captivity, as I may term it, I was
fully resolved, likewise in a Christian sense, to make my yoke as easy
as possible, thereby to give no offence to custom or law of any kind.
The tender affection that a good husband naturally has to the wife of
his bosom is such as to make him often pass by the greatest insults
that can be offered to human nature: such I mean as the senseless
provoking arguments used by one who will not be awakened from delusion
till poverty appears, shows the ingratitude of false friends in
prosperity, and brings her to sad repentance in adversity: she will
then wish she had been foreseeing as her husband, when it is too late;
condemn her foolish credulity, and abhor those who have caused her to
differ from her truest friend, whose days she has embittered with the
most undutiful aggravations, to render every thing uncomfortable to
him!”
I suspect that Thomas Gent was wrong in thinking thus of his wife; I
am sure he was wrong in thus writing of her, and that I should be
doing wrong in repeating what he has written, if it were not with the
intention of showing that though he represents himself in this passage
as another Job, Socrates, or Jerry Sneak, it must not be concluded
that his wife resembled the termagant daughter of Sir Jacob Jollup,
Xantippe, Rahamat the daughter of Ephraim, her cousin Makher the
daughter of Manasseh, or Queen Saba, whichever of these three latter
were the wife of Job.
And here let me observe that although I follow the common usage in
writing the last venerable name, I prefer the orthography of Junius
and Tremellius who write Hiob, because it better represents the sound
of the original Hebrew, and is moreover more euphonous than Job, or
Jobab, if those commentators err not who identify that King of Edom
with the man of Uz. Indeed it is always meet and right to follow the
established usage unless there be some valid reason for departing from
it; and moreover there is this to be said in favour of retaining the
usual form and pronunciation of this well known name, that if it were
denaturalized and put out of use, an etymology in our language would
be lost sight of. For a _job_ in the working or operative sense of the
word is evidently something which it requires patience to perform; in
the physical and moral sense, as when for example in the language of
the vulgar a personal hurt or misfortune is called a bad _job_, it is
something which it requires patience to support; and in the political
sense it is something which it requires patience in the public to
endure: and in all these senses the origin of the word must be traced
to Job, who is the proverbial exemplar of this virtue. This derivation
has escaped Johnson; nor has that lexicographer noticed the
substantives _jobing_ and _jobation_, and the verb to _jobe_, all from
the same root, and familiar in the mouths of the people.
For these reasons therefore, and especially the etymological one, I
prefer the common though peradventure, and indeed perlikelihood,
erroneous manner of writing the name to Iob, Hiob, Ajob, Ajoub, or
Jjob, all which have been proposed. And I do not think it worth while,
(that is my while or the reader's,) to enquire into the derivation of
the name, and whether it may with most probability be expounded to
mean sorrowful, jubilant, persecuted, beloved, zealous, or wise in the
sense of sage, seer, or magician. Nor whether Job was also called
Jasub, Jaschub, Jocab, Jocam, Jobal, Jubab, Hobab, or Uz of that ilk,
for this also has been contended. Nor to investigate the position of a
territory the name of which has been rendered so famous by its
connection with him, and of which nothing but the name is known. This
indeed has occasioned much discussion among biblical chorographers.
And not many years have elapsed since at a late hour of the night, or
perhaps an early one of the morning, the watchman in Great Russel
Street found it necessary in the discharge of his duty to interpose
between two learned and elderly gentlemen, who returning together from
a literary compotation, had entered upon this discussion on the way,
and forgetting the example of the Man of Uz, quarrelled about the
situation of his country. The scene of this dispute,—the only one upon
that subject that ever required the interference of the watch in the
streets of London at midnight,—was near the Museum Gate, and the
Author of the Indian Antiquities was one of the disputants.
Returning however to the matter which these last parenthetical
paragraphs interrupted, I say that before luke-warm Thomas represented
himself as another Job for matrimonial endurance, he ought to have
asked himself whether the motives for which he married the widow
Bourne, were the same as those for which he wooed the fair maiden
Alice Guy; and whether, if Mrs. Gent suspected that as she had been
obliged to her first husband for her money, she was obliged to the
money for her second, it was not very natural for her to resent any
remonstrances on his part, when she entertained or assisted those whom
she believed to be her friends, and who peradventure had claims upon
her hospitality or her bounty for her late husband's sake.
A woman's goodness, when she is a wife,
Lies much upon a man's desert; believe it Sir.
If there be fault in her, I'll pawn my life on't
'Twas first in him, if she were ever good.[1]
If there be any reader so inconsiderate as to exclaim, “what have we
to do with the temper and character of a low-lived woman who was dead
and buried long before we were born, whom nobody ever heard of before,
and for whom nobody cares a straw now! What can have induced this most
unaccountable of authors to waste his time and thoughts upon such
people and such matter!”—Should there I say, be persons, as in all
likelihood there may, so impatient and so unreasonable as to complain
in this manner, I might content myself with observing to them in the
words of that thoughtful and happy-minded man Mr. Danby of Swinton,
that if Common Sense had not a vehicle to carry it abroad, it must
always stay at home.
[Footnote 1: BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.]
But I am of the school of Job, and will reply with Uzzite patience to
these objectors, as soon as I shall have related in a few words the
little more that remains to be said of Thomas Gent, printer of York,
and Alice his wife. They had only one child, it died an infant of six
months, and the father speaks with great feeling of its illness and
death. “I buried its pretty corpse,” he says, “in the Church of St.
Michael le Belfrey where it was laid on the breast of Mr. Charles
Bourne, my predecessor, in the chancel on the south side of the
altar.” This was in 1726; there he was buried himself more than half a
century afterwards, in the 87th year of his age; and Alice who opened
the door to him when he first arrived in York was no doubt deposited
in the same vault with both her husbands.