CHAPTER CXV.

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.

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.