Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/311

Rh So much for Mrs. Job!

One is not inclined to waste much sympathy on Socrates, when it is remembered that he followed no blind Cupid in wedding Xantippe, but that with malice prepense, and confessedly for self discipline, the philosopher courted, married and endured the tempest-tempered woman, whose name has passed into a proverb. Moreover, the old Greek had a naughty way of expending all his attractions and fascinations upon the sidewalk committee at Athens, whom he called his scholars; while, for the home market, he never had anything to spare besides his ugly face, with its flat nose, its goggle eyes, its thick lips, not to speak of the bare poll under which he used to scud, or the squat figure, the clumsy, awkward gait, the congenial rags and unsandaled feet, that made up those externals, which alone Xantippe was permitted to study as the exponents of the Aristocratic Philosophy. Who wonders that she preferred to be known in history rather as Xantippe than as Mrs. Socrates? or that, woman as she was, her tongue could be hung otherwise than in the middle while such domestic aggravations formed the bulk of her experience? Considering the duplicity he practiced in making his choice of a wife, Xantippe's curtain lectures found in Socrates an audience fit, though few.

Scaliger seems to have caught a Tartar, too; for what except matrimonial miseries could have extorted from him so savage a sentence as "Febris hectica uxor, et non nisi morte avellenda." A wife is a hectic fever, and not to be cured but by death. Salmasius had a termagant wife, whose tongue served to illustrate the patience of her learned lord, and whose loud-mouthed conceit was a standing advertisement of her own stupidity and her husband's genius.

Burton, the author of that quaint medley, the "Anatomy of Melancholy," was not brave enough to run the risk of marrying; but he kept his eyes and ears open, and remarked, oracularly, "I never tried, but, as I hear some of them say, Mare, haud mare, vos mare acerrimum, an Irish sea is not so turbulent and raging as a litigious wife." After which specimen of free translation he lugs in the well-wived Stoic, Seneca, as declaring, "Scylla and Charybdis are less dangerous; there is no beast that is so noxious."

Sir Thomas More was none the happier for his matrimonial experience, for we are told that his wife's temper was as harsh as her manners were sordid, and that her disposition was so morose as to suggest her husband's advising her to play on musical instruments, if so be she might soften it.

Pasquier, whose eloquence and learning placed him at the head of French advocates in his day, and whose pleadings against the Jesuits made him a formidable opponent of the order, had a wife so noisy as to be a nuisance. To rule his household he was obliged to drown her vociferations with thunder tones of his own. "Un-