Danced on the dark-browed warrior’s mail,
And kissed his waving plume.”
The light-and-shade of the scene seems to bring to mind some lost Correggio. And how like Giorgione is the “flame” dancing on the warrior’s mail, and “kissing his waving plume!” (Plate [24].) In reading the “Faery Queene” one finds a whole gallery of pictures painted with words. Spenser would have made a painter, for he had the pictorial mind. Milton is not unlike him; and Shakespeare goes hither and yon over all fields and through all departments. Here, for example, is his genre picture of the hounds of Theseus:
“My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flewed, so sanded: and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-kneed and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls.”
XVIII.—VAN DYCK, Jean Grusset Richardot. Louvre, Paris.
Surely a very striking picture, but after all you cannot see Shakespeare’s hounds so completely and perfectly as those of Velasquez or Snyders or Troyon.