e SOME translation of this poem is a fact resting
on his own statement in a passage indisputably written by him (in the
"Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women"); nor is the value of this
statement reduced by the negative circumstance, that in the
extraordinary tag (if it may be called by so irreverent a name) to the
extant "Canterbury Tales," the "Romaunt of the Rose" is passed over in
silence, or at least not nominally mentioned, among the objectionable
works which the poet is there made to retract. And there seems at
least no necessity for giving in to the conclusion that Chaucer's
translation has been lost, and was not that which has been hitherto
accepted as his. For this conclusion is based upon the use of a formal
test, which in truth 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 s