§ 18. The third result may, accordingly, be arrived at thus. Seeing that Chaucer really translated the 'Roman de la Rose,' and that three fragments of English translations have come down to us, of which two cannot be his, whilst the third may be, _we may provisionally accept fragment A as genuine; and we find that, the more closely we examine it, the more probable does its genuineness become_. § 19. SUMMARY.--Having now discussed the three fragments A, B, C, successively and separately (though in a different order), we may conveniently sum up the three results as follows. 1. Fragment A appears to be a real portion of Chaucer's own translation. Its occurrence, at the _beginning_, is, after all, just what we should expect. The scribe or editor would naturally follow it as far as it was extant; and when it failed, would as naturally piece it out with any other translation or translations to which he could gain access. This fragment ceases suddenly, at the end of l. 1705, in the middle of an incomplete sentence. The junction with the succeeding portion is clumsily managed, for it falsely assumes that the previous sentence is complete, and leads off with a false rime. 2. Fragment B is obviously from some other source, and is at once dissociated from both the other fragments by the facts (_a_) that it was _originally_ written in a Northumbrian dialect, though this is somewhat concealed by the manipulation of the spelling by a later scribe; (_b_) that it was written in a more _diffuse_ style, the matter being expanded to the extent, on an average, of nearly twelve lines to ten; (_c_) that many licences appear in the rimes, which sometimes degenerate into mere assonances; and (_d_) that it is less exact and less correct in its method of rendering the original. 3. After fragment B, there is a large gap in the story, more than 5000 lines of the original being missing. Hence Fragment C is from yet a third source, not much of which seems to have been accessible. It neither joins on to Fragment B, nor carries the story much further; and it comes to an end somewhat suddenly, at a point more than 9000 lines from the end of the original. It is, however, both more correct than Fragment B, and more in Chaucer's style; though, at the same time, I cannot accept it as his.