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.