need not be regarded as of itself absolutely decisive in any case, but
which in this particular instance need not be held applicable at all. A
particular rule against rhyming with one another particular sounds, which
in his later poems Chaucer seems invariably to have followed, need not
have been observed by him in what was actually, or all but, his earliest.
The unfinished state of the extant translation accords with the
supposition that Chaucer broke it off on adopting (possibly after
conference with Gower, who likewise observes the rule) a more logical
practice as to the point in question. Moreover, no English translation of
this poem besides Chaucer's is ever known to have existed.

Whither should the youthful poet, when in search of materials on which to
exercise a ready but as yet untrained hand, have so naturally turned as to
French poetry, and in its domain whither so eagerly as to its universally
acknowledged master-piece? French verse was the delight of the Court,
into the service of which he was about this time preparing permanently to
enter, and with which he had been more or less connected from his boyhood.
In French Chaucer's contemporary Gower composed not only his first longer
work, but not less than fifty ballads or sonnets, and in French (as well
as in English) Chaucer himself may have possibly in his youth set his own
'prentice hand to the turning of "ballades, rondels, virelayes." The time
had not yet arrived, though it was not far distant, when his English verse
was to attest his admiration of Machault, whose fame Froissart and
Froissart's imitations had brought across from the French Court to the
English; and when Gransson, who served King Richard II as a squire, was
extolled by his English adapter as the "flower of them that write in
France." But as yet Chaucer's own tastes, his French blood, if he had any
in his veins, and the familiarity with the French tongue which he had
already had opportunities of acquiring, were more likely to commend to him
productions of broader literary merits and a wider popularity. From these