For they are not the cold fancies of plebeian poets, but the golden dreams of Ariosto, the celestial visions of Tasso, that are thus derided.
But now, as to the extravagance of these fictions, it is frequently, I believe, much less than these laughers apprehend.
To give an instance or two, of this sort.
One of the strangest circumstances in those books, is that of the women-warriors, with which they all abound. Butler, in his Hudibras, who saw it only in the light of a poetical invention, ridicules it, as a most unnatural idea, with great spirit. Yet in this representation, they did but copy from the manners of the times. Anna Comnena tells us, in the life of her father, that the wife of Robert the Norman fought side by side with her husband, in his battles; that she would rally the flying soldiers, and lead them back to the charge: and Nicetas observes, that, in the time of Manuel Comnena, there were in one Crusade many women, armed like men, on horseback.
What think you now of Tasso’s Clarinda, whose prodigies of valour I dare say you have often laughed at? Or, rather, what think you of that constant pair,
“Gildippe et Odoardo amanti e sposi,
In valor d’arme, e in lealtà famosi?”
C. III. s. 40.
Again: what can be more absurd and incredible, it is often said, than the vast armies we read of in Romance? a circumstance, to which Milton scruples not to allude in those lines of his Paradise Regained—
Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp,
When Agrican with all his northern powers
Besieg’d Albracca, as Romances tell,
The city of Gallaphrone, from thence to win
The fairest of her sex, Angelica.
B. III. ver. 337.
The classical reader is much scandalized on these occasions, and never fails to cry out on the impudence of these lying fablers. Yet if he did but reflect on the prodigious swarms which Europe sent out in the Crusades, and that the transactions of those days furnished the Romance-writers with their ideas and images, he would see that the marvellous in such stories was modest enough, and did not very much exceed the strict bounds of historical representation.
The first army, for instance, that marched for the Holy Land, even after all the losses it had sustained by the way, amounted, we are told, when it came to be mustered in the plains of Asia, to no less than seven hundred thousand fighting men: a number, which would almost have satisfied the Romancer’s keenest appetite for wonder and amplification.