Life & Wisdom Quote by John Gay

Leave it to an early-18th-century poet to lace social critique with a grin that shows teeth. John Gay’s line works because it weaponizes contrast: the “gamesters and highwaymen” (two archetypes of fashionable vice and criminal romance) are “very good” to their whores yet “devils” to their wives. The shock isn’t just the crude diction; it’s the moral inversion. The men society labels corrupt can perform tenderness - but only where it costs them nothing in status, obligation, or inheritance.

Gay is poking at a transactional masculinity that knows exactly when to be generous. A mistress is discretionary, privately managed, and easily mythologized as pleasure. A wife is public, contractual, and tied to property, lineage, and reputation. Kindness to a “whore” reads as libertine largesse; kindness to a wife would require daily restraint, responsibility, and some surrender of power. The line implies that cruelty in marriage isn’t a personal failing so much as a system feature: the legal and social structure of marriage lets men be “devils” with impunity.

Context matters: Gay’s England loved to consume vice as entertainment while pretending to police it. Think The Beggar’s Opera energy - criminals as mirrors for polite society. By pairing highwaymen with gamblers, Gay collapses the distance between the drawing room and the road. The subtext is that respectable domestic life can hide a more sanctioned brutality than open sin. The joke lands because it’s not just naughty; it’s accusing the audience of recognizing the type.