crime.

A sense of evanescence, of dreamlikeness, quite different from the
thoughtless enjoyment of Boiardo, from the bold and manly facing of the
future, the solemn, strong sense of life and death as of waking
realities, of the Elizabethan dramatists, even of weaklings like
Massinger and Beaumont. In Tasso and in Spenser there is no such
joyousness, no such solemnity; only a dreamy watching, a regret which is
scarcely a regret, at the evanescence of pale beauty and pale life, of
joys feebly felt and evils meekly borne.

With Tasso and Spenser comes to a close the school of Boiardo, the small
number of real artists who finally gave an enduring and beautiful shape
to that strangely mixed and altered material of romantic epic left
behind by the Middle Ages; comes to an end at least till our own day of
appreciative and deliberate imitation and selection and rearrangement of
the artistic forms of the past. Until the revival (after much study and
criticism) by our own poets of Arthur and Gudrun and the Fortunate
Isles, the world had had enough of mediaeval romance. Chivalry had
avowedly ended in chamberlainry; the devotion to women in the official
routine of the _cicisbeo_; the last romance to which the late
Renaissance had clung, which made it sympathize with Huon, Ogier,
Orlando, and Rinaldo, which had made it take delight still in the
fairyland of Oberon, of Fallerina, of Alcina, of Armida, of Acrasia, the
romance of the new world, had also turned into prose, prose of
blood-stained filth. The humanistic and rationalistic men of the
Renaissance had doubtless early begun to turn up their noses in dainty
dilettantism or scientific contempt, at what were later to be called by
Montaigne, "Ces Lancelots du Lac, ces Amadis, ces Huons et tels fatras
di livres a quoy l'enfance s'amuse;" and by Ben Jonson:

Public nothings,
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister,
Sent out to poison courts, and infect manners--

the public at large was more constant, and still retained a love for
mediaeval romance. But more than humanities, more than scientific
scepticism and religious puritanism, did the slow dispelling of the
illusion of Eldorado and the Fortunate Isles. Mankind set sail for
America in brilliant and knightly gear, believing in fountains of youth
and St. Brandan's Isles, with Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser still in its
pockets. It returns from America either as the tattered fever-str