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But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make realities; he works at every detail of character, history, or geography, which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms all the more melancholy, these beautiful and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and Tancreds and Godfreys why? because the real world around Tasso is peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas, and Annabellas and Giovannis, creatures for Webster and Ford; and because this world of chivalry is, in his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and Esplandian in Toboso and Barcelona for poor Don Quixote.
Their conscience was sickened, their imagination hag-ridden, by the discovery of so much beauty united to so much corruption; and, among our latter-day students of the Renaissance, there became manifest the same morbid pre-occupation, the same exaggerated repulsion, which is but inverted attraction, which were rife among the playwrights who wrote of Avengers and Atheists, Giovannis and Annabellas, Brachianos and Corombonas, and other White Devils, as old Webster picturesquely put it, of Italy.
These frightful Brachianos and Annabellas and Ferdinands and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of the "White Devil," of the "Duchess of Malfy," of the "Revenger's Tragedy," and of "Antonio and Mellida," are mere fantastic horrors, as false as the Counts Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty years ago.
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