lot till she thought herself on a heath six miles off--without
ever really changing place. But they do not, like Pulci, make fun of
their characters. They write chivalry romances not for Florentine
pork-butchers and wool-carders, but for gallant ladies and gentlemen, to
whom, with duels, tournaments, serenades, and fine speeches, chivalry is
an admired name, though no longer a respected reality.

The heroes of Boiardo and of Ariosto are always bold and gallant and
glittering, the spirit of romance is in them; a giant Sancho Panza like
Morgante, redolent of sausage and cheese, would never be admitted into
the society of a Ferrarese Orlando. The art of Boiardo and of Ariosto is
eminently pageant art, in which sentiment and heroism are but as one
element among many; there is no pretence at reality (although there is a
good deal of incidental realism), and no thought of the interest in
subject and persons which goes with reality. It is a masquerade, and one
whose men and women must, I think, be imagined in a kind of artistic
fancy costume: a mixture of the Renaissance dress and of the antique, as
we see it in the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian and
Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the Borghese gallery of
Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees and gold half-heraldically and
half-cabalistically patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the
little mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas and Alcinas,
of the enchantresses of Boiardo and Ariosto. Pageant people, these of
the Ferrarese poets; they only play at being in forests and deserts, as
children play at being on volcanoes or in Green-land by the nursery
fire. It is a kind of dressing up, a masquerading of the fancy; not
disguising in order to deceive, but rather laying hold of any pretty or
brilliant impressive garb that comes to hand, and putting that on in
conjunction with many odds and ends, as an artist's guests might do with
the silks and velvets and Oriental properties of a studio. These knights
and ladies, for ever tearing about from Scotland to India, never, in
point of fact, get any further than the Apennine slopes where Boiardo
was born, where Ariosto governed the Garfagnana. They ride for ever
(while supposed to be in the Ardennes or in Egypt) across the velvet
moss turf, all patterned with minute starry clovers and the fallen white
ropy chestnut blossom, amidst the bracken beneath the slender chestnut
trees, the pale blu