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 treated in endless variations. In short, Chaucer executed his task with facility, and frequently with grace, though for one reason or another he grew tired of it before he had carried it out with completeness. Yet the translation (and this may have been among the causes why he seems to have wearied of it) has notwithstanding a certain air of schoolwork; and though Chaucer's next poem, to which incontestable evidence assigns the date of the year 1369, is still very far from being wholly original, yet the step is great from the "Romaunt of the Rose" to the "Book of the Duchess."