, and see
its beauty and strength and solemness, we feel, like the people of the
Rhine bank, inclined to weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse,
"Surely this is some great saint."

Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the Middle Ages, the Italian
Renaissance also, by the hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us
a picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count Orlando, we are told
by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that in consequence of his having
discovered, in a certain pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair,
words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by the lover's kisses)
which revealed that the Princess Angelica of Cathay had disdained him
for Medoro, the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors; Count Orlando
went straightway out of his mind, and hanging up his armour and
stripping off his clothes, galloped about on his bare-backed horse,
slaughtering cows and sheep instead of Saracens; until it pleased God,
moved by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of Charlemagne, to
permit Astolfo to ride on the hippogriffs back up to the moon, and bring
back thence the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial. We
all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance has to say of Renaud of
Montauban is even stranger and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo
Boiardo, in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando
Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano, the contemner of love, was riding
in the Ardennes, he came to a clearing in the forest, where, close to
the fountain of Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery
meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and singing with them danced
also a naked youth, dark of eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his
lips, so that some might have said it was and others that it was not
there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke through their singing and
dancing, and rushed upon him, pelting him with roses and hyacinths and
violets from their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of
lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his armour to the
very marrow of his bones. Then when they had dragged him, tied with
garlands, by the feet round and round the meadow; wings, eyed not with
the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely damsels, suddenly
sprouted out of their shoulders, and they flew off, leaving the poor
baron, bruised on the grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future
resistance to love.

Such are the things