[Footnote 36: A circumstance is added by Chaucer which brings vividly
before the reader the advanced age of the knight:
The slacke skin about his necke shaketh
While that he sung.]
[Footnote 37: Chaucer had previously mentioned that it was the usage for
newly married wives to keep their chambers till the fourth day, and he
repeats the fact here:
As custom is unto these nobles all,
A bride shall not eaten in the hall,
Till dayes four, or three days atte least
I-passed be; then let her go to the feast.
The fourthe day complete from noon to noon,
When that the highe masse was i-doon,
In halle sit this January and May,
As fresh as is the brighte summer's day.]
[Footnote 38: In the original January passes a warm panegyric upon the
excellent qualities of Damian, which is meant to display in broader
contrast the treachery and infamy of the squire. The merchant in his own
person denounces the villany of Damian's conduct, and prays that all
persons may be protected from the machinations of those deceitful
vipers, who, when fostered in a family, employ their opportunities to
injure their benefactors. Pope has omitted every allusion of the kind,
and has treated the baseness of the squire as if he regarded it in the
light of a joke.]
[Footnote 39: It was at first "speaking sigh," which was distinctive.
"Heaving" is the accompaniment of all sighs, and, as the sigh of Damian
was soft, did not mark his in an especial degree.]
[Footnote 40: There is not a word, as may be supposed, in Chaucer of the
squire asking for divine assistance in his wicked schemes.]
[Footnote 41: May, on her return from the visit which, at her husband's
desire, she paid to Damian in his chamber, that she might cheer him in
his illness, read the billet that he had given her covertly, and the
result is thus told by Chaucer in a passage which has not been versified
by Pope:
This gentle May fulfilled of pite,
Right of her hand a letter maked she;
In which she granteth him her very grace;
There lacked nought but only day and place.
And when she saw her time upon a day
To visite this Damian goeth May,
And subtilely this letter down she thrust
Under his pillow; read it if him lust.
She taketh him by the hand, and hard him twist
So secretly, that no wight of it wist,
And bade him be all whole; and forth she went
To January, when that he for her sent.
Up riseth Damian the nexte morrow;
All passed was his sickness and his sorrow.]
[Footnote 42: The Epicurean philosophers.]
[Footnote 43: Addison's Letter from Italy:
My humbler verse demands a softer theme,
A painted meadow, or a purling stream.]
[Footnote 44: Pope has here shown his judgment in adopting the lighter
fairy race of Shakespeare and Milton. Chaucer has king Pluto and his
queen Proserpina.--BOWLES.
There was not much judgment required. They are fairies in Chaucer, but,
as was not unusual in his day, he called them by names taken from the
heathen mythology. Pope merely dropped the classical appellations, which
would have been an incongruity when he wrote. In the details of his
description he did not copy Shakespeare or Milton, but Dryden's version
of Chaucer's Wife of Bath:
The king of elfs, and little fairy queen
Gambolled on heaths, and danced on ev'ry green.]
[Footnote 45: Another couplet preceded this in the first edition:
Thus many a day with ease and plenty blessed
Our gen'rous knight his gentle dame possessed.]
[Footnote 46: Dryden's Palamon and Arcite:
Nor art, nor nature's band can ease my grief,
Nothing but death, the wretch's last relief.]
[Footnote 47: There is a natural trait in the original which is not
preserved by Pope. The knight weeps piteously at his sudden calamity:
But atte last, after a month or tweye,
His sorrow gan assuage sooth to say;
For when he wist it may not other be
He patiently took his adversitie.
This is one of the deeper and more solemn touches which Pope
systematically rejected. Although the old man gets reconciled to the
loss of his sight, his jealousy remains unabated.]
[Footnote 48:
Oh! January, what might it thee avail
If thou might see as far as shippes sail?
For as good is blind deceived be,
As to be deceived when a man may see.]
[Footnote 49: Chaucer only says that they whispered through the crevice
they discovered in the wall which divided the houses of their parents.
All their kisses were bestowed upon the wall itself, or as Sandys puts
it in his translation of Ovid,
Their kisses greet
The senseless stones, with lips that could not meet.]
[Footnote 50: This couplet, which is not in the original, is in the
style of the pastorals which were common in Pope's youth.]
[Footnote 51:
Thou art the creature that I best love;
For by the Lord that sit in heaven above,
Lever I had to dyen on a knife.
Than thee offende, deare, trewe wife.]
[Footnote 52: By the injudicious interpolation of this parenthesis Pope
makes the knight express his belief to May that she is more likely to be
kept faithful by her love of money than by her sense of honour and
religion. It is undeniable that covetousness would be the predominant
motive with a depraved woman, such as was poor old January's wife, but
this is not his settled conviction, and he would have shrunk from openly
admitting the idea.]
[Footnote 53: The knight's promise was to be performed the next morning.
His doubt was whether May, on her side, would fulfil the pledge of
perpetual fidelity. The ceremony is, therefore, reversed in the
original, and January asks _her_ to kiss _him_ in token of her adhesion
to the covenant.]
[Footnote 54: In the original the knight avows the jealousy, which in
Pope's version he denies, and excuses his misgivings on the ground of
May's beauty, and his own age. Having disclaimed all jealousy, there is
no longer any meaning in representing him as pleading the inequality of
his years to justify his conduct.]
[Footnote 55: May in the original is the same wicked, shameless woman
that she is described by Pope, but Chaucer is content to put into her
mouth the wish that she may die a foul death if she breaks her marriage
vows. There is not a hint of the more frightful imprecation she invokes
on herself in expressing the hope that she may descend alive into hell
when she commits the crime she is meditating at the moment.]
[Footnote 56: "Infidelity in women is a subject of the severest
crimination among the Turks. When any of these miserable girls are
apprehended, for the first time they are put to hard labor, &c.; but for
the second, they are recommitted, and many at a time tied up in sacks,
and taken in a boat to the Seraglio-Point, where they are thrown into
the tide." Dallaway's Constantinople.--BOWLES.]
[Footnote 57: The squire kneeling to worship May as she passed by is an
exaggerated trait supplied by Pope.]
[Footnote 58: At the conclusion of the hypocritical rejoinder of May, in
which she speaks the language of indignant innocence, the narrative goes
on thus in the original:
And with that word she saw where Damyan
Sat in the bush, and coughing, she began;
And with her fingers signes made she,
That Damyan should climb upon a tree,
That charged was with fruit, and up he went,
For verily he knew all her intent;
For in a letter she had told him all
Of this mattier, how he worke shall.]
[Footnote 59: These lines, which have no counterpart in Chaucer, owe
their beauty to Dryden's Wife of Bath's Tale:
He saw a choir of ladies in a round,
That featly footing seemed to skim the ground:
Thus dancing hand in hand, so light they were,
He knew not where they trod, on earth or air.]
[Footnote 60: The author of the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus.
Chaucer says that he seldom speaks of women with reverence, which is
correct. The statement of Pope that the son of Sirach asserted, like
Solomon, that there was no such thing as a good woman, is in direct
contradiction to various passages among his precepts.]
[Footnote 61: There is no specification of "these ladies" in Chaucer.]
[Footnote 62:
Now by my mother Ceres' soul, I swear
That I shall give her suffisaunt answere,
And alle women after for her sake;
That though they be in any guilt i-take,
With face bold they shall themselves excuse,
And bear them down that woulde them accuse.
For lack of answer none of them shall dyen.
All had ye seen a thing with both your eyen,
Yet shall we women visage it hardily,
And weep, and swear, and chide subtilely.]
[Footnote 63:
I wot well that this Jew, this Solomon,
Found of us women fooles many one;
But though he be founde no good woman,
Yet hath there founde many another man
Women full true, full good, and vertuous;
Witness on them that dwell in Christes house;
With martyrdom they proved their constaunce.]
[Footnote 64: Pluto and Proserpine each select that portion of the
meaning which is convenient. Both senses are included in the words of
Solomon, who at once asserts the general wickedness of mankind, and the
comparative worthlessness of women.]
[Footnote 65: The queen has just been boasting that she will endow the
sex with the art of ingenious lying to cover the violation of their most
solemn vows, and now she tauntingly tells her husband that it is not in
woman to break her word. This contradiction is imported into the story
by Pope. The original is as follows:--
Dame, quoth this Pluto, be no longer wroth,
I give it up; but since I swore mine oath,
That I will grante him his sight again,
My word shall stand, I warne you certain;
I am a king it sit me not to lie.
And I, quoth she, am queen of faierie.
Her answer shall she have I undertake,
Let us no more wordes hereof make.]
[Footnote 66: The allusion is to the common longing of pregnant women
for particular articles of diet. May cries out that she shall expire
unless she has some of the "small green pears" to eat, and then exclaims
anew,
I tell you well, a woman in my plight
May have to fruit so great an appetite,
That she may dyen, but she it have.]
[Footnote 67: The moral is Pope's own, and is in the dissolute spirit
which had descended from the reign of Charles II. The comment on the
story, in Chaucer, is put into the mouth of the host, who begs that he
may be preserved from such a wife, and inveighs against the craft and
misdoings of women.]