The theory which accompanies this nondescript collection of translations is scattered throughout various works, and is somewhat liable to misinterpretation if taken out of its immediate context. Before proceeding to consider it, however, it is necessary to notice certain phases of the general literary situation which created peculiar difficulties for the translator or which are likely to be confusing to the present-day reader. As regards the translator, existing circumstances were not encouraging. In the early part of the period he occupied a very lowly place. As compared with Latin, or even with French, the English language, undeveloped and unstandardized, could make its appeal only to the unlearned. It had, in the words of a thirteenth-century translator of Bishop Grosseteste's _Castle of Love_, "no savor before a clerk."[28] Sometimes, it is true, the English writer had the stimulus of patriotism. The translator of _Richard Coeur de Lion_ feels that Englishmen ought to be able to read in their own tongue the exploits of the English hero. The _Cursor Mundi_ is translated In to Inglis tong to rede For the love of Inglis lede, Inglis lede of Ingland.[29] But beyond this there was little to encourage the translator. His audience, as compared with the learned and the refined, who read Latin and French, was ignorant and undiscriminating; his crude medium was entirely unequal to reproducing what had been written in more highly developed languages. It is little wonder that in these early days his English should be termed "dim and dark." Even after Chaucer had showed that the despised language was capable of grace and charm, the writer of less genius must often have felt that beside the more sophisticated Latin or French, English could boast but scanty resources.