hin enchanted armour, invincible, invulnerable,
under a sky always blue, and through an unceasing spring, ever onwards
to new adventures. Adventures which the noble, gentle Castellan of
Scandiano, poet and knight and humorist, philanthropical philosopher
almost from sheer goodness of heart, yet a little crazy, and capable of
setting all the church bells ringing in honour of the invention of the
name of Rodomonte relates not to some dully ungrateful Alfonso or
Ippolito, but to his own guests, his own brilliant knights and ladies,
with ever and anon an effort to make them feel, through his verse, some
of those joyous spring-tide feelings which bubble up in himself; as when
he remembers how, "Once did I wander on a May morning in a fair
flower-adorned field on a hillside overlooking the sea, which was all
tremulous with light; and there, among the roses of a green thorn-brake,
a damsel was singing of love; singing so sweetly that the sweetness
still touches my heart; touches my heart, and makes me think of the
great delight it was to listen;" and how he would fain repeat that song,
and indeed an echo of its sweetness runs through his verse. Meanwhile,
stanza pours out after stanza, adventure grows out of adventure, each
more wonderful, more gorgeous than its predecessor. To which listen the
ladies, with their white, girdled dresses and crimped golden locks; the
youths, with their soft beardless faces framed in combed-out hair, with
their daggers on their hips and their plumed hats between their fingers;
and the serious bearded men, in silken robes; drawing nearer the poet,
letting go lute or violin or music-book as they listen on the villa
terrace or in some darkened room, where the sunset sky turns green-blue
behind the pillared window, and the roses hang over the trellise of the
cloister. And as they did four hundred years ago, so do we now, rejoice.
The great stalwart naked forms of Greece no longer leap and wrestle or
carry their well-poised baskets of washed linen before us; the mailed
and vizored knights of the Nibelungen no longer clash their armour to
the sound of Volker's red fiddle-bow; the glorified souls of Dante no
longer move in mystic mazes of light before the eyes of our fancy. All
that is gone. But here is the fairyland of the Renaissance. And thus
Matteo Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, goes on, adding adventure to
adventure, stanza to stanza, in his castle villa, or his palace at
Ferrara. But suddenly he stops