Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/310



N treating of Celebrated Shrews, there is, manifestly, small need of calling in the aid of Legend, Fiction or Fancy. Even Poetry must give place to her more sedate sister—History; else we might meander among the early plays of mediaeval days, which, scriptural in subject, are far from solemn in tone, and in which even Mrs. Noah is held up to ridicule and contempt as the veriest type of shrew—a horrible heresy which Chaucer seems to put faith in, as witness that ungallant speech of Nicholas, in the "Canterbury Tales:"

But the domestic discords (Noah-westers, so to speak) of the patriarch do not come within the purview of our present inquiry. Let us rather, with muck-rake and drag-net, make prize of more modern material, which may be found lying loose around and within comparatively easy reach.

In passing, however, from the distant past into regions this side of the first great navigator, we must not slight the claim which, despite the labored endeavors of friendly expositors in her behalf. Job's wife presents to be lifted into bad eminence as, perhaps, the earliest of shrews. Her provoking speeches and scant sympathy, while schooling her poor partner's patience, reflect small credit upon herself, except in so far as she was honored in being made a means of grace. The perfect work of patience had not else been wrought out in Job, if, losing all beside, the sparing of his wife were not an added bitter in his cup! Sons and daughters, cattle and sheep, lands and houses—all were taken; but a wife was left, a "miserable comforter," who could urge the model man to "curse God and die." Thus, briefly, our version writes her biography and gibbets her temper. But the Septuagint translation expands her speech into the following shrewish oration: reading it one thinks Douglas Jerrold a plagiarist, and Mrs. Caudle a Bible heroine: