cathedral, to split the huge marble masses while they stared in astonished envy; as he sat, unconscious of their mutterings, eating his dry bread and porridge in the building docks by the river. And then, when wearied, he had sunk to sleep in the hay-loft, dreaming perchance that all this evil life was but a dream and the awakening therefrom to happiness and strength; the jealous workmen came and killed him with their base tools, and cast him into the Rhine. They say that the huge body floated on the water, surrounded by a great halo; and that when the men of the banks, seeing this, reverently fished it out, they found that the noble corpse was untouched by decay, and still surrounded by a light of glory. And thus, it seems to me, this Renaud, this rebel baron of whose reality we know nothing, has floated surrounded by a halo of poetry down the black flood of the Middle Ages (in which so much has sunk); and when we look upon his face, and see its beauty and strength and solemness, we feel, like the people of the Rhine bank, inclined to weep, and to say of this mysterious corpse, "Surely this is some great saint."

Of each of these heroes thus shown us by the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance also, by the hand of two of her greatest poets, has given us a picture. And first, of Roland. Of him, of Count Orlando, we are told by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, that in consequence of his having discovered, in a certain pleasant grotto among the ferns and maidenhair, words graven on the rock (interrupted, doubtless, by the lover's kisses) which revealed that the Princess Angelica of Cathay had disdained him for Medoro, the fair-haired page of the King of the Moors; Count Orlando went straightway out of his mind, and hanging up his armour and stripping off his clothes, galloped about on his bare-backed horse, slaughtering cows and sheep instead of Saracens; until it pleased God, moved by the danger of Christendom and the prayers of Charlemagne, to permit Astolfo to ride on the hippogriffs back up to the moon, and bring back thence the wits of the great paladin contained in a small phial. We all know that merry tale. What the Renaissance has to say of Renaud of Montauban is even stranger and more fantastic. One day, says Matteo Boiardo, in the fifteenth canto of the second part of his "Orlando Innamorato," as Rinaldo of Montalbano, the contemner of love, was riding in the Ardennes, he came to a clearing in the forest, where, close to the fountain of Merlin, a wonderful sight met his eyes. On a flowery meadow were dancing three naked damsels, and singing with them danced also a naked youth, dark of eyes and fair of hair, the first down on his lips, so that some might have said it was and others that it was not there. On Rinaldo's approach they broke through their singing and dancing, and rushed upon him, pelting him with roses and hyacinths and violets from their baskets, and beating him with great sheaves of lilies, which burnt like flames through the plates of his armour to the very marrow of his bones. Then when they had dragged him, tied with garlands, by the feet round and round the meadow; wings, eyed not with the eyes of a peacock but with the eyes of lovely damsels, suddenly sprouted out of their shoulders, and they flew off, leaving the poor baron, bruised on the grass, to meditate upon the vanity of all future resistance to love.

Such are the things which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance found to tell us of the two great heroes of Carolingian poetry. And the explanation of how it came to pass, that for the Roland of the song of Roncevaux was substituted the Orlando of Ariosto, and for the Renaud of "The Quatre Fils Aymon" the Rinaldo of Matteo Boiardo—means simply that which I desire here to study: the metamorphoses of mediaeval romance stuffs, and, more especially, the vicissitudes of the cycle of Charlemagne.