[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[57] The squire kneeling to worship May as she passed by is an exaggerated trait supplied by Pope.
[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 chargèd 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.
[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.
[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.