rotected
(except against some stray murder by one of the Estensi themselves), by
the duke's well-organized police; houses with well-trimmed gardens, like
so many Paris hotels; and with the grand russet brick castle, military
with its moat and towers, urban with its belvederes and balconies, in
the middle, well placed to sweep away with its guns (the wonderful guns
of the duke's own making) any riot, tidily, cleanly, without a nasty
heap of bodies and slop of blood as in the narrow streets of other
towns Imagine this bright capital, placed, moreover, in the richest
centre of Lombardy, with glitter of chivalry from the Euganean hills and
Apennines (castellated with Este, Monselice, Canossa, and Boiardo's own
Scandiano); with gorgeous rarities of commerce from Venice and Milan--a
central, unique spot. It is the natural home of the chivalrous poets of
the Renaissance, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso; as Florence is of the
Politians and Pulcis (Hellenism and back-shopery); and Venice of the
literature of lust, jests, cynicism, and adventure, Aretine, Beolco,
Calmo, and Poliphilo-Colonna. In that garden, where the white
butterflies crowd among the fruit trees bowed down to the tall grass of
the palace of Schifanoia--a garden neither grand nor classic, but
elegiac and charming--we can imagine Boiardo or Ariosto reading their
poems to just such a goodly company as Giraldi Cinthio (a Ferrarese, and
fond of romance, too) describes in the prologue of his "Ecatomiti:"
gentle and sprightful ladies, with the splendid brocaded robes, and the
gold-filleted golden hair of Dosso Dossi's wonderful Alcina Circe;
graceful youths like the princely St. John of Benvenuto Garofalo;
jesters like Dosso's at Modena; brilliant captains like his St. George
and St. Michael; and a little crowd of pages with doublets and sleeves
laced with gold tags, of sedate magistrates in fur robes and scarlet
caps, of white-dressed maids with instruments of music and embroidery
frames and hand looms, like those which Cosimo Tura painted for Duke
Borso on the walls of this same Schifanoia palace. Such is the audience;
now for the poems.

The stuff of Boiardo and Ariosto is the same: that old mediaeval stuff of
the Carolingian poems, coloured, scented with Arthurian chivalry and
wonder. The knight-errantry of the Keltic tales is cleverly blended with
the pseudo-historical military organization of the Carolingian cycle.
Paladins and Saracens are ingeniously manoeuvred about,