According to the Lachmann theory, the poem consists of no less than twenty distinct lays, each differing inherently from the rest, and each, with the exception of the Eighth and Ninth, by different authors. To arrive at this result, more than a third of the entire number of stanzas has, for one reason or another, been rejected as not genuine. As Lettsom has cleverly put it in the original preface to his translation, where this whole matter is presented with some detail: "He [Lachmann] has in fact put every stanza and every verse on its trial. Some have been condemned by him to italics, as interpolations; others to brackets, as continuations by different hands; others again, which he supposes to be the latest additions, so far from being pitied for their youth, have been visited with both kinds of punishment. He has not, however, sentenced any of the delinquents to transportation from the text; or, perhaps it would be more correct to say that he has sentenced them, but has not carried the sentence into execution. The result of the whole assize has been that out of the 2,316 stanzas 1,437 have been honorably acquitted; the rest have been italicised, bracketed, or both.... The twenty lays," he continues, "which had already suffered from the interpolations and corruptions incident to oral tradition, were first collected, committed to writing, and patched together into one poem about the year 1210 by some unknown compiler, whose handiwork was afterward corrected or depraved by two separate but equally unknown revisers. It is his opinion that scarcely a stanza of what we possess is older than 1190, while even the latest additions are not more recent than 1225. The whole poem, therefore, is, according to Professor Lachmann, the work of contemporary authors, whether we call their compositions spurious or genuine; and the task undertaken is neither more nor less than to distribute a mass of unowned literary property among nineteen or twenty poets and an indefinite number of poetasters, of whom nothing, not even their existence, is known except by conjecture, and of whose distinguishing characteristics we are of course completely ignorant, except as far as we may guess at them from the internal evidence, real or imagined, of the poem itself."