followed by:—
'Whan I had smelled the savour swote,
No wille hadde I fro thens yit go'; &c.
It will be observed that the sentence in the two former lines is incomplete; dide is a mere auxiliary verb, and the real verb of the sentence is lost; whilst the two latter lines lead off with a new sentence altogether. It is still more interesting to observe that, at this very point, we come upon a false rime. The word aboute was then pronounced (abuu·tə), where (uu) denotes the sound of ou in soup, and (ə) denotes an obscure vowel, like the a in China. But the vowel o in swote was then pronounced like the German o in G. so (nearly E. o in so), so that it was quite unlike the M.E. ou; and the rime is no better than if we were to rime the mod. E. boot with the mod. E. goat. It is clear that there has been a join here, and a rather clumsy one. The supply of 'copy' of the first translation ran short, perhaps because the rest of it had been torn away and lost, and the missing matter was supplied from some other source. We thus obtain, as the result to be tested, the following arrangement:—
Fragment A.—Lines 1-1705. French text, 1-1678.
Fragment B.—Lines 1706-5810. French text, 1679-5169.
Fragment C.—Lines 5811-7698. French text, 10716-12564.
It should be noted, further, that l. 7698 by no means reaches to the end. It merely corresponds to l. 12564 of the French text, leaving 9510 lines untouched towards the end, besides the gap of 5547 lines between Fragments B and C. In fact, the three fragments, conjointly, only represent 7018 lines of the original, leaving 15056 lines (more than double that number) wholly untranslated.
[§ 6]. Discussion of Fragment B.
Test I.—Proportion of English to French.—As regards these fragments, one thing strikes us at once, viz. the much greater diffuseness of the translation in fragment B, as may be seen from the following table:—