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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 mediæval 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
Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices, artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots, apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more frightful inventories of the Amadis romances.
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