presence of
ladies and ecclesiastics was not the slightest check upon the tongues of
the pilgrims, and it is evident that in ordinary social life, there was
hardly any limit to the freedom of expression. But in every age a
latitude is allowed in conversation which would be condemned in books,
and Chaucer merely excused himself for recording in poetry the common
colloquial terms of his day. Usage had rendered them inoffensive, and in
themselves they argued no more impurity of thought than the equivalent
circumlocutions of our own generation. The greater or less plainness of
speech which has prevailed at different eras is often rather a question
of manners than of morality. If Pope or Dryden had retained, in this
particular, the phraseology of Chaucer, the adherence to the letter of
the original would have completely falsified its spirit, just as words
which are uttered with innocence by rustics in a cottage would be an
evidence of the utmost depravity when spoken by a man of education in a
drawing-room. The intention influences the effect, and the grossness of
our early writers has not the taint to a reader of the present day which
would attach to similar language when employed by corrupt minds in
civilized times. All the expurgations of Pope were insufficient to make
his version as little exceptionable in the eighteenth century as was the
original of Chaucer to the world of the fourteenth century. A merchant
in the reign of Queen Anne would not have ventured to recite the
modernised story in a mixed company, where ladies like the prioress and
the nuns were present. The tone of the work is even lowered in places.
In the looser literature of Pope's youth, and especially in comedies,
adultery in a wife only furnished food for laughter against the husband.
This is the aspect which is imparted to the translation of January and
May, and it cannot be denied that Chaucer himself in some of his other
stories, is open to the charge of treating vice as a jest. But he did
not fall into the error in the Merchant's Tale, where the supposed
narrator, in accordance with his character, reprobates the criminal
conduct of the treacherous squire and the faithless wife, at the same
time that he exposes the doating folly of the amorous knight.

JANUARY AND MAY:

OR, THE

MERCHANT'S TALE.

There lived in Lombardy, as authors write,
In days of old, a wise and worthy knight;
Of gentle manners, as of gen'rous race,