mfortable edifices,
artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots,
apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and
menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of
Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless
descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more
frightful inventories of the Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a
kind of anticipated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Friedrichsruhe
or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales
and Pan!) flower-beds filled with coloured plaster and spas, and
cascades spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps) under your feet
and over your head. All the vineyards and cornfields have been swept
away to make these solemn terraces and water-works; all the cottages
which, with their little wooden shrine, their humble enclosure of
sunflowers and rosemary and fruit trees, their buzzing hives and barking
dogs, were loved and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart
coffeehouse wits like Horace; all these have been swept away to be
replaced by the carefully constructed (? wire) bowers, the aviaries, the
porticoes, the frightful circular edifice (_tondo e il ricco edificio_),
a masterpiece of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo,
Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves. What has become of
Calypso's island? of the orchards of Alcinous? What would the noble
knights and ladies of Ariosto and Spenser think of them? What would they
say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they to meet Nausicaa with
the washed linen piled on her waggon? Alas! they would take her for a
laundress. For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle
Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso,
Spenser, even in the midst of their most unblushing plagiarisms from
Antiquity: their heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded by
equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or at best (the knights
at least) good only for aristocratic warfare. Plough or prune! defile
the knightly hands! wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso,
or Penelope! The mere thought sends them very nearly into a faint. No:
the ladies of mediaeval romance must sit quiet, idle; at most they may
sing to the lute; and if they work with their hands, it must be some
dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work; they are hot-house