ng
pilgrimages, but "stations" are not included in her list. The Roman
Catholicism of Pope had rendered the word familiar to him.]

[Footnote 23: The expression "I can't tell how" implies that the
intimacy on the part of the wife of Bath was accidental, whereas it
appears from Pope's context, and still more from the original, that it
was a deliberate design:

Now will I telle forth what happed me.
I say that in the fieldes walked we
Till truely we had such dalliance
This clerk and I, that of my purveyance
I spake to him, and saide how that he
If I were widdow, shoulde wedde me.
For certainly I say for no bobaunce,
Yet was I never withouten purveyance
Of mariage, ne or no thinges eke;
I hold a mouse's heart not worth a leek,
That hath but oon hole to sterte to,
And if that faile then is all i-do.

The acknowledgment that while married to one man she is always engaged
to a second, seems to the wife of Bath to have nothing discreditable in
it, and she only fears lest she should expose herself to the charge of
vanity in asserting that she can command a succession of admirers.]

[Footnote 24: No Englishwoman would talk of laying her husband in his
urn, not to mention that the phrase is a mixture of incongruous ideas,
the "laid" being applicable to burial, and the "urn" to burning. When
the wife of Bath speaks of her departed husband she says,

He is now in his grave and in his chest.]

[Footnote 25: This couplet is an exaggeration of the original:

I followed ay my dames lore,
As well of that as of other thinges more.]

[Footnote 26: Tearing garments, and throwing dust upon the head was a
custom with some ancient nations, but was not an English habit, and
there is no allusion to it in the text of Chaucer:

When that my fourthe husband was on bier,
I wept algate, and made a sorry cheer,
As wives musten for it is usage;
And with my kerchief covered my visage;
But, for that I was purveyed of a mate,
I wept but small, and that I undertake.

The hard-hearted selfishness which does not bestow a thought upon the
dead, being solely intent upon enjoying existence with the living, comes
out in a yet more odious light when she narrates her feelings at the
funeral. Her mind is entirely taken up with the young clerk, and mainly
with admiration of his figure:

When that I saw him go
After the bier,