Page:Romance of the Rose (Ellis), volume 1.pdf/11

Rh work, or he would rather say the pleasurable pastime; for he is fain to acknowledge that the eighteen months which were occupied by the actual translation embraced some of the most agreeably spent hours of a long life.

The task of translating the “Romance of the Rose” in its entirety has often been re­ferred to as a gigantic undertaking, but it con­tains only eight thousand lines more than the “Divina Commedia,” which has been translated into English innumerable times. The file of a newspaper for eighteen months, set aheap, would be an appalling task indeed to peruse with mode­-rate attention; but taken in daily portions, one makes little of the business, dreary though it be—so has it been that the two-and-twenty thousand six hundred and eight lines of “The Romance of the Rose” have melted imperceptibly as the days followed on, the work of each presenting some pleasant variety.

The extreme popularity enjoyed by this famous book from the last quarter of the thir­teenth to the close of the fifteenth century is attested by the fact that not less than two hundred manuscript copies of it have survived the waste of centuries (while of the “Canterbury Tales” no more than fifty-nine are known), and printed editions followed in rapid succession from about 1480 till 1538. But, strange to say, except the translation made by Chaucer, and