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 exercise
of style. How far he had already advanced in this respect, and how
lightly our language was already moulding itself in his hands, may be seen
from several passages in the poem; for instance, from that about the
middle, where the old and new theme of self-contradictoriness of love is