THE CANTERBURY TALES
and day, when he had leisure and vacation from other worldly business, it was his custom to read on this book of wicked wives. He knew more legends of them and histories than there be of good wives in the Bible. For trust well, it is an impossibility that any clerk will speak good of wives, unless it be of holy saints, but of any other woman never. Who painted the lion, tell me who? By God, if women had written stories, as clerks have within their cells, they would have written of men more wickedness than the whole race of Adam might amend. The children of Mercury be full adverse in their working to those of Venus. Mercury loveth wisdom and knowledge, and Venus loveth riot and spending. And because of their diverse temperament, each declineth in the other's exaltation ; and thus Mercury, God wot, is desolate in Pisces, where Venus is exalted; and Venus falleth where Mercury is uplifted; therefore no woman is praised of a clerk. The clerk, when he is old and hath lost his amorousness, then sitteth he down and writeth in his dotage that women cannot keep their wedding-vows!
"But now to my point, pardee, why, as I was about to tell thee, I was beaten for a book. On a night, my lord and master Jankin, as he sat by the fire, read on his book first of Eve, by whose wickedness all mankind was brought to woe, for which Jesu Christ himself was slain, and redeemed us with his heart's blood. Lo! here may ye see it expressly written of woman, that she was the perdition of all mankind. Then he read me how, when Samson lay sleeping, his mistress cut off his hair with her shears; through which treason he lost both his eyes. Then he read me of Hercules and his Deianira, that caused him to burn to death. Nor forgot he the penance and woe that Socrates had
with his two wives; how Xantippe cast slops on his head; this
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