And then ensues the history of their loves and of the hero’s death.
But Keats in his hospital days knew no Italian, and could only have heard of such a passage in Boiardo through Leigh Hunt. So I think the derivation of his fragment from any of the regular Alexander romances must be given up, and the source indicated in the text be accepted, namely the popular fabliau of the Lai d’Aristote (probably in Way’s rimed version), where the thing happens exactly as Keats tells it, and whence the idea of the sudden encounter with an Indian maiden probably lingered in his mind till he revived it in Endymion. As for the sources of the attempt at voluptuous description, it is a little surprising to find Milton’s ‘tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hills’ remembered in such a connexion: other things are an easily recognizable farrago from Cymbeline,—
| ‘Cytherea, How bravely thou becomest thy bed, fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets!’ |
from Venus and Adonis,—
| ‘A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow;’ ‘Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white;’ |
from Lucrece,—
| —‘the morning’s silver-melting dew;’ |
from Twelfth Night,
| —‘like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets;’ |
and so forth. Prof. Gollancz suggests that ‘Cuthberte’ as the name of the author is a reminiscence from the ‘Cuddie’ of Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calendar, and that the ‘good Arthure’ may also be some kind of Spenserian reference: but I suspect ‘Arthure’ here to be a mis-transcription (we have no autograph) for ‘authoure.’