"A Gossip? No.
"But still she was an ill wife, and very bad wife, and he did not know what to do with her. At last one of the Society asked him, 'If his worship was a good husband,' at which being a little surprised, he could not tell what to say. Whereupon the Club resolved,
"1. That most women that are bad wives are made so by their husbands. 2. That this Society will hear no complaint against a virtuous bad wife from a vicious good husband. 3. He that has a bad wife and can't find the reason of it in her, 'tis ten to one that he finds it in himself."
Sometimes correspondents ask advice as to which of several lovers they should choose. The following applicants have a different grievances.
"Gentlemen.—There are no less than sixty ladies of us, all neighbours, dwelling in the same village, that are now arrived at those years at which we expect (if ever) to be caressed and adored, or, at least flattered. We have often heard of the attempts of whining lovers; of the charming poems they had composed in praise of their mistresses' wit and beauty (tho' they have not had half so much of either of them as the meanest in our company), of the passions of their love, and that death itself had presently followed upon a denial. But we find now that the men, especially of our village, are so dull and lumpish, so languid and indifferent, that we are almost forced to put words into their mouths, and when they have got them they have scarce spirit to utter them. So that we are apt to fear it will be the fate of all of us, as it is already of some, to live to be old maids. Now the thing, Gentlemen, that we desire of you is, that, if possible, you would let us understand the reason why the case is so mightily altered from what it was formerly; for our experience is so vastly different from what we have heard, that we are ready to believe that all the stories we have heard of lovers and their mistresses are fictions and mere banter."
The case of these ladies is indeed to be pitied, and the Society have been further informed that the backwardness or fewness of the men in that town has driven the poor ladies to unusual extremities, such as running out into the fields to meet the men, and sending their maids to ask them; and at last running away with their fathers' coachmen, prentices, and the like, to the particular scandal of the town.
The Society concluded that the ladies should leave the village "famous for having more coaches than Christians in it," as a learned man once took the freedom to tell them "from the pulpit" and go to market, i.e., to London.
The "Advice of the Scandalous Club" was discontinued from May, 1703.
Although we cannot say that Defoe carried his sword in a myrtle wreath, he certainly owed much of his celebrity to his insinuating under ambiguous language the boldest political opinions. He was fond of literary whimsicalities, and wrote a humorous "History," referring mostly to the events of the times. Towards the end of his career, he happily turned his talent for disguises and fictions into a quieter and more profitable direction. How many thousands remember him as the author of "Robinson Crusoe" who never heard a word about his jousts and conflicts, his animosities and misfortunes!
The last century, although adorned by several celebrated wits, was less rich in humour than the present. Literature had a grave and pedantic character, for where there was any mental activity, instruction was sought almost to the exclusion of gaiety. It required a greater spread of education and experience to create a source of superior humour, or to awaken any considerable demand for it. Hence, although the taste was so increased that several periodicals of a professedly humorous nature were started, they disappeared soon after their commencement. To record their brief existence is like writing the epitaphs of the departed. Towards the termination of the previous century, comic literature was represented by an occasional fly-sheet, shot off to satirize some absurdity of the day. The first humorous periodical which has come to our knowledge, partakes, as might have been expected, of an ecclesiastical character and betokens the severity of the times. It appeared in 1670, under the title of "Jesuita Vapulans, or a Whip for the Fool's Back, and a Gad for his Foul Mouth." The next seems to have been a small weekly paper called "Heraclitus Ridens," published in 1681. It was mostly directed against Dissenters and Republicans; and in No. 9, we have a kind of Litany commencing:—