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This is the real fairyland, the wonderland of mediæval romance and of Persian and Arabian tales, no longer solemn or awful, but brilliant, sunny, only half believed in; the fairyland of the Renaissance, superficially artistic, with its lightest, brightest fancies, and its charming realities; its cloistered and painted courts with plashing fountains, its tapestried and inlaid rooms, its towered and belvedered villas, its quaint clipped gardens full of strange Oriental plants and beasts; and all this transported into a country of wonders, where are the gardens of the Hesperides, the fountain of Merlin, the tomb of Narcissus, the castle of Morgan-le-Fay; every quaint and beautiful fancy, antique and mediæval, mixed up together, as in some Renaissance picture of Botticelli or Rosselli or Filippino, where knights in armour descend from Pegasus before Roman temples, where swarthy white-turbaned Turks, with oddly bunched-up trousers and jewelled caftans, and half-naked, oak-crowned youths, like genii descended, pensive and wondering, from some antique sarcophagus, and dapper princelets and stalwart knights, and citizens and monks, all crowd round the altar of some wonder-working Macone or Apolline or Trevigante; some comic, dreadful, apish figure, mummed up in half-antique, half-oriental garb.
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