and grows merry over it, like a man of pleasure, a sceptic who rejoices doubly in his pleasure because it is sweet, and because it is forbidden. By his side poor Tasso, inspired by a fanatical, revived, factitious Catholicism, amid the tinsel of an old school of poetry, works on the same subject, in sickly fashion, with great effort and scant success. Cervantes, himself a knight, albeit he loves chivalry for its nobleness, perceives its folly, and crushes it to the ground, with heavy blows, in the mishaps of the wayside inns. More coarsely, more openly, Rabelais, a rude commoner, drowns it with a burst of laughter, in his merriment and nastiness. Spenser alone takes it seriously and naturally. He is on the level of so much nobleness, dignity, reverie. He is not yet settled and shut in by that species of exact common-sense which was to found and cramp the whole modern civilization. In his heart he inhabits the poetic and shadowy land from which men were daily drawing farther and farther away. He is enamored of it, even to its very language; he revives the old words, the expressions of the Middle Ages, the style of Chaucer, especially in the "Shepherd's Calendar." He enters straightway upon the strangest dreams of the old story-tellers, without astonishment, like a man who has still stranger dreams of his own. Enchanted castles, monsters and giants, duels in the woods, wandering ladies, all spring up under his hands, the mediæval fancy with the mediaeval generosity; and it is just because this world is unreal that it so suits his humor.