"Sir, do you impute that to my desire of gadding, which might have happened to yourself with all your wisdom and gravity? The serpent spoke so excellently, and with so good a grace, that—Besides, what harm had I ever done him, that he should design me any? Was I to have been always at your side, I might as well have continued there, and been but your rib still: but if I was so weak a creature as you thought me, why did you not interpose your sage authority more absolutely? You denied me going as faintly, as you say I resisted the serpent. Had not you been too easy, neither you or I had now transgressed."
Adam replied, "Why, Eve, hast thou the impudence to upbraid me as the cause of thy transgression for my indulgence to thee? Thus it will ever be with him who trusts too much to woman: at the same time that she refuses to be governed, if she suffers by her obstinacy, she will accuse the man that shall leave her to herself."
Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning:
And of their vain contest appeared no end.[65]
This to the modern will appear but a very faint piece of conjugal enmity; but you are to consider, that they were but just begun to be angry, and they wanted new words for expressing their new passions. But her accusing him of letting her go, and telling him how good a speaker and how fine a gentleman the devil was, we must reckon, allowing for the improvements of time, that she gave him the same provocation as if she had called him cuckold. The passionate and familiar terms with which the same case, repeated daily for so many thousand years, has furnished the present generation, were not then in use; but the foundation of debate has ever been the same, a contention about their merit and wisdom. Our general mother was a beauty, and hearing there was another now in the world, could not forbear (as Adam tells her) showing herself, though to the devil, by whom the same vanity made her liable to be betrayed.
I cannot, with all the help of science and astrology, find any other remedy for this evil, but what was the medicine in this first quarrel; which was, as appeared in the next book, that they were convinced of their being both weak, but one weaker than the other.
If it were possible that the beauteous could but rage a little before a glass, and see their pretty countenances grow wild, it is not to be doubted but it would have a very good effect; but that would require temper: for Lady Firebrand, upon observing her features swell when her maid vexed her the other day, stamped her dressing-glass under her feet. In this case, when one of this temper is moved, she is like a witch in an operation, and makes all things turn round with her. The very fabric is in a vertigo when she begins to charm. In an instant, whatever was the occasion that moved her blood, she has such intolerable servants, Betty is so awkward, Tom can't carry a message, and her husband has so little respect for her, that she, poor woman, is weary of this life, and was born to be unhappy.
Desunt multa.
Advertisement.
The season now coming on in which the town will begin to fill, Mr. Bickerstaff gives notice, that from the 1st of October next, he will be much wittier than he has hitherto been.[66]