says that she paid no regard to the clerk's Roman
precedents, his quotations from Scripture, his old saws and proverbs.

Ne I would not of him corrected be;
I hate him that my vices telleth me.

The contempt with which she treated his exhortations drove him utterly
mad, and it was then that he betook himself to reading all the
literature he could find that bore upon the vices and frailties of
women. The evidence of their general perversity with which his studies
supplied him consoled him for the ungovernable disposition of his own
wife, and he used "to laugh away full fast" over the record of their
obstinacy and evil doings. He had the sweeter satisfaction of revenge.
His mirth galled his imperious, froward wife, and when he read aloud the
endless detail of female iniquities, backed up by the authority of great
names, she could restrain her rage no longer, and the storm burst forth
under which the wretched clerk succumbed.]

[Footnote 30: Pope has omitted a stroke of humour; for in the original,
she naturally mistakes the rank and age of St. Jerome.

And eke there was a clerk sometime in Rome
A _cardinal,_ that highten St. Jerome.--WARTON.]

[Footnote 31: This passage acquaints us with the writers who were
popular in the days of Chaucer.--WARTON.

Warton takes no account of the fact that Chaucer was only enumerating
the authors which furnished arguments against women. Valerius is a tract
by Walter Mapes, which bears the title "Epistola Valerii ad Rufinum."
St. Jerome's denunciations of matrimony are in his treatise "Contra
Jovinianum." Tertullian wrote strongly against second marriages; and
severe animadversions upon female vices or weaknesses have a large place
in his works. "Who is meant by Chrysippus," says Tyrwhitt, "I cannot
guess." Ovid's Art of Love, and the Letters of Eloisa and Abelard are
known by name to all the world.]

[Footnote 32: This line is not in Chaucer.]

[Footnote 33: If Pope intended to follow the original, "good" means
"good legends."]

[Footnote 34: The wife of Bath, having laid down the maxim that it is
impossible for any clerk to speak well of women, except it be of the
saints, indignantly inquires,

Who painted the lion, tell me, who?

and with an oath she adds,

If women hadde written stories,
As clerkes have within their oratories,
They would have writ of men more wickedness,
Than all the mark of Adam may redress.

"Than all the mar