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:

H