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240

SHREWS AND SCOLDS IN FICTION.

himself out of all patience," and made the house too hot for every one else. Years later we are told of the effective discipline of the same lady, who "by the force of pride, religion, and cognac, had erected a most terrible tyranny in the house." Mrs. Berry is one of those "Men's Wives" sketched by Titmarsh, whose tactics are significant; as where, at supper-time, "she gave a martyrized look, and left the room; and while we partook of the very unnecessary repast, was good enough to sing some hymn tunes to an exceedingly slow movement in the next room, intimating that she was awake, and that, though suffering, she found her consolations in religion," such as, to her taste and in her temper, it might be. Mrs. Furnival, in Orley Farm, is proposed as a model of the female married victim who ever makes the very most of such positive wrongs as Providence may vouchsafe her. But pre-eminent in her kind, this kind, is the Mrs. Varney of Dickens. She is most devout when most ill-tempered. Whenever she and her husband are at unusual variance, the Protestant Manual is her constant companion. She is seldom very Protestant at meals, unless it happens that they are underdone, or over-done, or indeed that anything occurs to put her out of humour. Then again there is Mrs Wilfer, on principle "in a sombre darkling state," with "lurid indications" of storm visible athwart the awful gloom of her composure; and the Mrs. Fielding of a much earlier story, whose "Now carry me to the grave," uttered in absolute health, would lapse in a state of dreadful calmness, and that in a bitterly sarcastic mood, she being a nobody, whom nobody ought to trouble themselves about, and so forth, usque ad nauseam, necnon ultra. As Gresset's Geronte is driven to protest,—

"Oh! parbleu ! tout ceci commence à m'ennuyer:
Je suis las des humeurs qu'il me faut essuyer;

FEMININE FRACTIOUSNESS.

Comment! on ne peut plus être un seul jour tranquille !
Je vois bien qu'elle boude, et je connais son style;
Eh bien moi, les boudeurs sont mon aversion,
Et je n'en veux jamais souffrir dans ma maison.

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Cela m'excède enfin. Je veux que tout le monde

Se porte bien chez moi, que personne n'y gronde."

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The Je veux may be a Sic volo, sic jubeo; but where there is a woman's will the other way, the master of the house is not quite sure of the mastery.

Swift 'contrasts, not compares, a cloudy sky with a cloudy-tempered wife :

"The bolt discharged, the sky grows clear;

But every sublunary dowdy,

The more she scolds, the more she's cloudy.

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A clerical essayist avows his conviction that many able, sensitive men have never had a fair chance in life, their powers having been crippled, their views embittered, their whole nature soured, by what he calls "a constant discipline of petty whips and scourges, and little pricking needles, applied (in some cases through pure stolidity and coarseness of nature) by an ill-mated wife;" so that it is only by flying from their own fireside that they can escape the unceasing gadfly, with its petty, irritating, never-ending sting. Not even the strongest and most violent man, says Jean Paul Richter, can hold out in the long run against the eternal pouting and fractiousness of a woman. The author of a tractate on Man and his Master, says of "nagging," that no form of torture which has yet been invented,* save perhaps the

Bridget Duster, in Punch's Complete Letter Writer, can't abear a mistress that's always nagging and nagging. A good noise once

R

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CONTINUAL DROPPING.

slow dropping of water on some highly sensitive part of the frame, can afford a parallel to this ingenious application of the principle of penitence. "The absolute certainty that, when snub, or scolding, or refusal have died into silence, the word will be said over again; the certainty that it will be said year after year, month after month, week after week; the irritation of expecting it, the irritation of hearing it, the irritation of expecting it again, tell on the firmest will in the world." Only souls feminine are up to the mark in the matter of such iterations,

"Which to pursue, were but a feminine humour,
And far beneath the dignity of man,"

as Ben Jonson has it in the Poetaster. The Abbess in Shakspeare's Comedy of Errors approves in the abstract of Adriana's reprehending her faulty husband; but when she comes to particulars, and learns the lady's modus operandi, she can at once account for the husband going out of his mind: in public as well as private, Adriana lectured, upbraided, reprehended Antipholus, in bed and at board:

"In bed, he slept not for my urging it;
At board, he fed not for my urging it ;
Alone, it was the subject of my theme;
In company, I often glanced at it;

Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.
Abbess. And thereof came it, that the man was mad."

The continual "dropping" of the text is written "dripping" by some old divines. That reminds us of Sheridan's comment on the "drip, drip," of the lines in Coleridge's Remorse. “Drip-drip-drip ?—Why, here's nothing but dripping."

in a way she don't mind-it brisks up one's blood; but she has known mistresses always pushing their words at you and about you, as if they were sticking pins in a cushion with no flesh and blood.

THE DIVINITY THAT SHAPES OUR ENDS.

THE

PROVERBS XX. 24.

HE divine controls the human in its outgoings and the issue of them all. "Man's goings are of the Lord; how can a man then understand his own way?" There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. "There are many devices in a man's heart; nevertheless, the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand." Chance gets the credit of the controlling influence, in the Greek proverb, Ταυτόματον ἡμῶν καλλίω βουλεύεται. But Hamlet reads the matter better when he affirms, in a passage from which the pith has already been extracted, but of which the whole context is pregnant and pithy enough to bear repetition, that

"Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.”

The out-come of the roughest of rough-hewing is shapely, after all; for the Hand of God has been working in and by the hand of man, and a Divine Artist has ordered the workmanship of the human artisan.

It is well seen and said, that no doubt every life is full of mistakes; and the rare possibility of finding in our own case which of them has told lastingly against us, is urged as an argument against morbidly dwelling upon them; for, going by analogy-observing what sort of mistakes press and gnaw on the minds of others—our

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'THERE'S A DIVINITY

own sensitiveness is proved to be a far from infallible judge. "We may then be attaching mighty consequences to some indiscretion which has really served us well, while the mistake which has damaged us may lurk altogether out of our cognizance." Who, as Dr. Rowland Williams asks, has not known impulse saving those whom deliberation before temptation would have ruined; and accident, or one of those tokens of Providence which seem accidental, opening a path which calculation could not have devised? Butler's couplet is pointed and pertinent :

"Some people's fortunes, like a weft or stray,
Are only gained by losing of their way."

Campbell, on the other hand, reflects "how oft the wisest, on misfortune's shelves are wrecked by errors most unlike themselves." Addison reflects how very often it happens that prudence, which has always in it a great mixture of caution, hinders a man from being so fortunate as he might possibly have been without it. "A person who only aims at what is likely to succeed, and follows closely the dictates of human prudence, never meets with those great and unforeseen successes, which are often the effect of a sanguine temper or a more happy rashness." This is indeed but a paraphrase of the Shakspearean doctrine that our indiscretion sometimes serves us well. The moral attached to La Fontaine's fable of the two adventurers and the talisman, is in scope, if not in terms, equivalent :

“Fortune aveugle suit aveugle hardiesse.
Le sage quelquefois fait bien d'exécuter
Avant que de donner le temps à la sagesse
D'envisager le fait, et sans la consulter."

That was in every sense a lucky hit which Protogenes the painter made, when painting the dog whose foaming at the mouth was so much admired. Pliny tells us how

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