It is too bad they do not make children’s books for grown people today, delightful, unreal fables for adults, to temper the prosaic duties of living, to make them forget the regrettable, cast off care, and be joyous. There are none who need such books more than grown people. I am thinking of Ariosto, his _Orlando Furioso_. How long ago Ariosto was born! Before the discovery of America. I like the name an old Italian historian applied to him in his youth, _uno gentiluomo ferrarese_. His charm of manner won him appointment as gentleman in waiting at the Court of Cardinal Hippolyte of Este. He was grateful for this. It meant life among lettered men, nobles, beauties, at Court of a powerful Cardinal. In the first Canto of the _Furioso_ he thanks him. _Ippolito aggradír questo che vuole e darvi sol puo l’úmil sérvo vostro Quel ch’io vi debbo, posso di parole Pagare in parte, e d’opere d’inchióstro._ He can pay only in part and with words; with pen and ink, he declares humbly. The story-telling splendor of the world is in this glowing, complex, impossible fable, written when chivalry was in flower, in Italy. Its remote forebears were great Indian Epics, the heroic tales of Firdusi, who was the Persian Homer; and its relative in time in his own land, was Virgil’s _Æneid_. All this accomplished invention went to its grace. The opening is from Virgil: _Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amóri, Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto._ One of this book’s gay far descendants (It has many!) wandered from Italy northward, to fields of France. There it was known as _The Three Musketeers_. It has had rollicking, gay followers, imitators in the art of letters, throughout the world; not only merry, entire book-sequences, like the romance of Dumas _père_, but individual lines have been re-written down the centuries. Tennyson was a renowned borrower from Latin, from Italian masters. It is difficult indeed to estimate his debt to Horace. Here are descriptions of castles like that impregnable one of the Niebelungs. Here are lines that tally with Dante— _Come i gru van cantando lor lai._ Here is the modern storehouse of romance, in short, from which scholars, from which poets, drew material. Here are pictures in words which Watteau painted again in colors. Here is an art of writing rich, fluent, as the countless carven marbles of Italy. No one can write such books today. It belongs to the mammoth, the monumental past. We are _little_. Its fluency, ease, grace, its inventive power, are incomparable. There lingers about it the tapestried leisure of ancient monarchies. Not many books keep so securely the atmosphere in which they were first read. The atmosphere that created it dominates. It belonged to a period that did not know subways nor moving pictures.