ssful life,
That is betwixt a husband and his wife.]

[Footnote 4: In the original,

And certainly, as sooth as God is king,
To take a wife it is a glorious thing;
And namely when a man is old and hoar,
Then is a wife the fruit of his tresor.

This is another instance that the merchant's remarks are sarcastic; for
no rational person would gravely assert that to wed was especially wise
in old age, when a man was married for his money alone. The whole
purport of the tale was to prove that such an alliance ended in
discomfiture. The vein of satire is continued through the subsequent
reflections. The merchant represents January as imagining wives to be
models of obedience and fidelity, who will cleave to a husband through
weal and woe, and will never be weary of loving and serving him, though
he is bed-ridden all his days. The example of May, to which the
description is a preface, shows that the praises are meant to be
interpreted in an adverse sense.]

[Footnote 5: In the original the merchant is quoting an invective
against wives from the Liber Aureolus of Theophrastus, who had long been
dead. Hence the narrator calls down a curse upon his _bones_ in the name
of the advocates of matrimony:

This entent and an hundred sithe worse
Writeth this man; there God his bones curse.

"Sithe" signifies "times." Pope has generalised the imprecation, and
extended it to all bards, living or deceased, whereby the fitness of
invoking a curse upon their bones is destroyed.]

[Footnote 6: Chaucer would have thought it an anomaly for a Christian
knight to invoke the heathen deities. The original is,

A wife! ah! Sainte Mary, _benedicite_,
How might a man have any adversite
That hath a wife? certes I cannot say.

The requirements of the metre in this and other passages of Chaucer,
show that _benedicite_ was sometimes contracted, in the pronunciation,
to _ben'cite_.]

[Footnote 7: The merchant, in his account of the motives which actuated
the knight, dilates more largely in the original, and in more
enthusiastic language, upon the felicity of marriage. A wife helps her
husband in his work, is the careful guardian of his property, and is
perfect in her submission.

She saith nought ones nay when he saith ye;
Do this, saith he; all ready, sir, saith she.

Consequently the married man

Upon his bare knees ought all his life
Thanken his God that him hath sent a wife;

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