Wayte, what thing we may not lightly have,
Thereafter will we soonest cry and crave.
Forbid us thing, and that desire we;
Press on us fast, and thenne will we flee.
With danger outen alle we our ware;
Great press at market maketh dear chaffare.

"Daungerous" in the second line means sparing, and in the last line but
one, "with danger" signifies with a scarcity. Then, says the wife of
Bath, we must produce all our own wares to give in exchange. At the date
of her fifth marriage she was forty and the bridegroom was only twenty.
Everything is now reversed. Her first husbands had endowed her with all
their property that they might buy a young wife in their old age. She,
in turn, that she may procure a young husband, gives him

all the land and fee
That ever was me give therebefore;
But afterward repented me full sore.

Her aged mates had worshipped her, and she repaid them with disdain. In
her mature years she is infatuated by a youth, and he, who has no relish
for the homage of a matron of forty, slights her just as she had done
her early husbands under similar circumstances.]

[Footnote 20: It would seem from Chaucer that the youth was a native of
Bath, and had returned there when he had completed his education at
Oxford:

He some time was a clerk of Oxenford,
And had left school, and went at home to board,
With my gossib, duelling in our town:
God have her soul, her name was Alisoun.

"My gossib" is my godmother, and the wife of Bath, whose christian name
was also Alisoun, had been named after her. Pope, by turning "_my_
gossip" into "_a_ gossip," has done away with the special relationship,
and employed the word in its modern sense of a lover of tittle-tattle.]

[Footnote 21: In Chaucer she adds a more powerful motive:

what wist I where my grace
Was shapen for to be, or in what place?

In other words, as she explains shortly afterwards, she was in search of
a lover who might succeed the fourth husband whenever he died.]

[Footnote 22: "To perform a station," says Richelet, in his French
Dictionary, "consists in visiting with devotion one or several churches
a certain number of days and times, and praying there in order to
propitiate the wrath of God, and obtain some favour from his mercy." The
wife of Bath in the original says, that she attended vigils,
processions, preachings, miracle-plays, and marriages, besides maki