But meanwhile, for all that Florentine burgesses, artizans, and humorists may think, there is in this Italy of the Renaissance something besides Florence; there is a school of poetry, disconnected with the realisms of Lorenzo and Pulci, with the Ovidian Petrarchisms of Politian. There is Ferrara. Lying, as they do, between the Northern Apennine slopes of Modena and the Euganean hills, the dominions of the House of Este appear at first sight merely as part and parcel of Lombardy, and we should expect from them nothing very different from that which we expect from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy: industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either side, into the defiles of the Euganean hills to the north, into the widening torrent valleys of the Modenese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of Este stretches up into feudalism, into chivalry, into the imaginative kingdom of the Middle Ages. Mediævalism, feudalism, chivalry, indeed, of a very modified sort; and as different from that of France and Germany as differ from the poverty-stricken plains and forests and and moors of the north these Italian mountain slopes, along which the vines crawl in long trellises, and the chestnuts rise in endlessly superposed tiers of terraces, cultivated by a peasant who is not the serf, but the equal sharer in profits with the master of the soil. And on one of those fertile hill-sides, looking down upon a narrow valley all a green-blue shimmer with corn and vine-bearing elms, was born, in the year 1434, Matteo Maria Boiardo, in the village which gave him the title, one of the highest in the Estensian dominions, of Count of Scandiano. Here, in the Apennines, Scandiano is a fortified village, also a castle, doubtless half turned into a Renaissance villa, but mediæval and feudal nevertheless; but the name of Scandiano belongs also, I know not for what reason, to a certain little red-brick palace on the outskirts of Ferrara, beautifully painted with half-allegorical, half-realistic pageant frescoes by Cosimo Tura, and enclosing a sweet tangled orchard-garden; to all of which, being the place to which Duke Borso and Duke Ercole were wont to retire for amusement, the Ferrarese have given the further name of Schifanoia, which means, "fly from cares." This little coincidence of Scandiano the feudal castle in the Apennines, and Scandiano the little pleasure palace at Ferrara, seems to give, by accidental allegory, a fair idea of the double nature of Matteo Boiardo, of the Ferrarese court to which he belonged, and of the school of poetry (including the more notable but less original work of Ariosto) which the genius of the man and the character of the court succeeded together in producing.