The great ease of the translation makes it read almost like an original work, though we cannot agree with those who think that the translator has improved on his model. No literal translation, not even the very best, can be free from a certain stiffness and constraint.
The felicity with which difficult passages are occasionally rendered may be judged by the following lines, which contain a touch almost worthy of Shirley. It is, if our own experience be worth anything, excessively hard to translate. We subjoin original and translation, side by side.
'Les yex gros et si envoisiés,
Qu'il rioient tousjors avant
Que la bouchette par couvant.'
'Hir eyen greye and glad also,
That laugheden ay in hir semblaunt,
First or the mouth by couvenant.'
That is, her eyes began to laugh before her lips.
We must, as briefly as possible, set forth the action of the poem. It begins, like De Guilleville's 'Pilgrimage of Grace,' Chaucer's 'Court of Love' (borrowed, of course, from this), Alain de l'Isle's 'Complaint of Nature,' and so many other mediæval works, with a dream. In the month of May,—that season when the earth forgets the poverty of winter, and grows proud of her renewed beauty, clothing herself in a robe of flowers of a hundred colours; when the birds, silent during the long cold months, awake again, and are so joyous that they are fain, per force, to sing,—the youth of twenty summers wanders forth and comes upon the Garden of Delight (Déduit). We may remark here, how the walled garden, secured from the outer world, is the mediæval writer's only idea of scenery. Perhaps our modern craving for the picturesque would be greatly modified if we were uncertain, as our ancestors were, about wolves, bears, and brigands, whose admiration for wild scenes induces them to inhabit them.