y the arbour, where our spectatress has remained
all the while seeing and unseen, ladies and knights ride along and away.
Only one lady in white rides alone after the rest. To her she comes out,
and enquires what the wandering show means. The answer, given with
courteous explicitness, imports in sum that those who wear chaplets of
Agnus Castus are virgins; the laurel wearers, knights who were never
conquered; the Nine most distinguished knights being the Nine Worthies;
with whom are the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne, and many "knightes olde" of
the Garter. Those who wear woodbine

"Be such as never were
To love untrewe in word, thoghte, ne dede."

They wear the Leaf, because the beauty of the Leaf lasts. But the
followers of the Flower are "those that loved idlenesse and not delite of
no besinesse, but for to hunte and hawke and pley in medes, and many other
such idle dedes." They wear the perishable Flower accordingly. The
informant ends with enquiring of her auditress, whether she will, for the
years to come, serve the Leaf or the Flower; who in answer vows her
observance to the Leaf. The deep implication of the ancient mythology in
the reviving poetry, here again discovers itself. It appears the lady of
the Leaf is the goddess Diana; the lady of the Flower, Flora in person.

The invention is remarkably well purposed, and well carried through. The
division of the world into those who follow virtue and those who pursue
their own delight, is a good general poetico-ethical view, and the
delicate emblems happily chosen for expressing the contrast. The heat and
the tempest which overwhelm the dainty voluptuaries, and are harmless to
the deed-worthy, express the true wisdom of virtue, even for this world,
which moves not at our will; and the gentle healing kindness of the wiser
to the less wise, whom they equalize with themselves, might almost seem
profoundly to signify the recovery to the better wisdom of those who had
set out with choosing amiss--a gracious hidden Christian lesson of charity
and penitence. The contact of the simply human spectatress with beings
brought from the world of imagination, is boldly designed. Here is no
Dream. She walks down from her own house into the wood, and the vision
comes and goes, in all the strength of true flesh and blood. The
solitariness of her stealing out from a sleepless bed, "about the
springing of the day, long or the brighte sonne uprisen was"--therefore,
whilst