, the falcon
on the wrist, the lynxes chained to the saddle, all the magnificence
dreamed by Gentile da Fabriano; and among it all ride, met by bevies
of peacock-winged angels, kneeling and singing before the flowering
rose-hedges, the Three Kings. The old man, who looks like some Platonist
philosopher, the beardless prince, surrounded by his noisy huntsmen and
pages; and that dark-bearded youth in the Byzantine dress and shovel
hat, the genuine king from the East, riding with ardent, wistful eyes, a
beautiful kingly young Quixote: Sir Percival seeking the Holy Grail, or
King Cophetua seeking for his beggar girl. It is a page of fairy tale,
retold by Boiardo or Spenser.

After such things as these it is difficult to speak of those more
prosaic tales, really intended as such, on which the painters of the
Renaissance spent their fancy. Still they have all their charm, these
fairy tales, not of the great poets indeed, but of the nursery.

There is, for instance, the story of a good young man (with a name for
a fairy tale too, AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini!) showing his adventures by
land and sea and at many courts, the honours conferred on him by kings
and emperors, and how at last he was made Pope, having begun as a mere
poor scholar on a grey nag; all painted by Pinturicchio in the Cathedral
library of Siena. There is the lamentable story of a bride and bridegroom,
by Vittore Carpaccio: the stately, tall bride, St. Ursula, and the dear
little foolish bridegroom, looking like her little brother; a story
containing a great many incidents: the sending of an embassy to the King;
the King being sorely puzzled in his mind, leaning his arm upon his bed
and asking the Queen's advice; the presence upon the palace steps of an
ill-favoured old lady, with a crutch and basket, suspiciously like the
bad fairy who had been forgotten at the christening; the apparition of
an angel to the Princess, sleeping, with her crown neatly put away at
the foot of the bed; the arrival of the big ship in foreign parts, with
the Bishop and Clergy putting their heads out of the port-holes and
asking very earnestly, "Where are we?" and finally, a most fearful
slaughter of the Princess and her eleven thousand ladies-in-waiting. The
same Carpaccio--a regular old gossip from whom one would expect all the
formulas, "and then he says to the king, Sacred Crown," "and then the
Prince walks, walks, walks, walks." "A company of knights in armour nice
and shining,"