vignettes, where the gentle ladies, seated with
lute and viol under vine-trellises, welcome the young gallant, or poet,
or knight.

Such is the world of Boiardo. Spenser has once or twice peeped in,
painted it, and given us exquisite little pictures, as that of
Malecasta's castle, all hung with mythological tapestries, that of the
enchanted chamber of Britomart, and those of Sir Calidore meeting the
Graces and of Hellenore dancing with the Satyrs; but Spenser has done it
rarely, trembling to return to his dreary allegories. Equal to these
single pictures by Spenser, Boiardo has only one or two, but he keeps us
permanently in the world where such pictures are painted. Boiardo is not
a great artist like Spenser: but he is a wizard, which is better. He
leads us, unceasingly, through the little dreamy laurelwoods, where we
meet crisp-haired damsels tied to pine-trees, or terrible dragons, or
enchanted wells, through whose translucent green waters we see brocaded
rooms full of fair ladies; he ferries us ever and anon across shallow
streams, to the castles where _gentil donzelle_ wave their kerchiefs
from the pillared belvedere; he slips us unseen into the camps and
council-rooms of the splendidly trapped Saracens, like so many figures
out of Filippino's frescoes; he conducts us across the bridges where
giants stand warders, to the mysterious carved tombs whence issue green
and crested snakes, who, kissed by a paladin, turn into lovely
enchantresses; he takes us beneath the beds of rivers and through the
bowels of the earth where kings and knights turned into statues of gold,
sit round tables covered with jewels, illumined by carbuncles more
wonderful than that of Jamschid; or through the mazes of fairy gardens,
where every ear of corn, cut off, turns into a wild beast, and every
fallen leaf into a bird, where hydras watch in the waters and lamias
rear themselves in the grass, where Orlando must fill his helmet with
roses lest he hear the voice of the sirens; where all the wonders of
Antiquity--the snake-women, the Circes, the sirens, the hydras and fauns
live, strangely changed into something infinitely quaint and graceful,
still half-antique, yet already half-Arabian or Keltic, in the midst of
the fairyland of Merlin and of Oberon--live, move, transform themselves
afresh; where the golden-haired damsels and the stripling knights,
delicate like Pinturicchio's Prince Charmings, gallop for ever on their
enchanted coursers, wit