the case, his version of the "Roman de la
Rose" seems, on the whole, to be a translation properly so
called--although, considering the great number of MSS. existing of the
French original, it would probably be no easy task to verify the
assertion that in one or the other of these are to be found the few
passages thought to have been interpolated by Chaucer. On the other
hand, his omissions are extensive; indeed, the whole of his translation
amounts to little more than one-third of the French original. It is
all the more noteworthy that Chaucer reproduces only about one-half of
the part contributed by Jean de Meung, and again condenses this half to
one-third of its length. In general, he has preserved the French names
of localities, and even occasionally helps himself to a rhyme by
retaining a French word. Occasionally he shows a certain timidity as a
translator, speaking of "the tree which in France men call a pine," and
pointing out, so that there may be no mistake, that mermaidens are
called it "sereyns" (sirenes) in France. On the other hand, his
natural vivacity now and then suggests to him a turn of phrase or an
illustration of his own. As a loyal English courtier he cannot compare
a fair bachelor to any one so aptly as to "the lord's son of Windsor;"
and as writing not far from the time when the Statute of Kilkenny was
passed, he cannot lose the opportunity of inventing an Irish parentage
for Wicked-Tongue:

So full of cursed rage
It well agreed with his lineage;
For him an Irishwoman bare.

The debt which Chaucer in his later works owed to the "Roman of the
Rose" was considerable, and by no means confined to the favourite
May-morning exordium and the recurring machinery of a vision--to the
origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio related by Cicero and
expounded in the widely-read Commentary of Macrobius) the opening lines
of the "Romaunt" point. He owes to the French poem both the germs of
felicitous phrases, such as the famous designation of Nature as "the
Vicar of the almighty Lord," and perhaps touches used by him in
passages like that in which he afterwards, with further aid from other
sources, drew the character of a true gentleman. But the main service
which the work of this translation rendered to him was the opportunity
which it offered of practising and perfecting a ready and happy choice
of words,--a service in which, perhaps, lies the chief use of all
translation, considered as an e