“Oh miracol d’amor! che le faville
  Tragge del pianto, e’i cor’ ne l’acqua accende.”  St. 76.

  Oh, miracle of love! that draweth sparks
  Of fire from tears, and kindlest hearts in water!

This puerile antithesis of fire and water, fire and ice, light in darkness, silence in speech, together with such pretty turns as wounding one’s-self in wounding others, and the worse sacrifice of consistency and truth of feeling,—­lovers making long speeches on the least fitting occasions, and ladies retaining their rosy cheeks in the midst of fears of death,—­is to be met with, more or less, throughout the poem.  I have no doubt they were the proximate cause of that general corruption of taste which was afterwards completed by Marino, the acquaintance and ardent admirer of Tasso when a boy.  They have been laid to the charge of Petrarch; but, without entering into the question, how far and in what instances conceits may not be natural to lovers haunted, as Petrarch was, with one idea, and seeing it in every thing they behold, what had the great epic poet to do with the faults of the lyrical?  And what is to be said for his standing in need of the excuse of bad example?  Homer and Milton were in no such want.  Virgil would not have copied the tricks of Ovid.  There is an effeminacy and self-reflection in Tasso, analogous to his Rinaldo, in the enchanted garden; where the hero wore a looking-glass by his side, in which he contemplated his sophisticated self, and the meretricious beauty of his enchantress.[38] Agreeably to this tendency to weakness, the style of Tasso, when not supported by great occasions (and even the occasion itself sometimes fails him), is too apt to fall into tameness and common-place,—­to want movement and picture; while, at the same time, with singular defect of enjoyment, it does not possess the music which might be expected from a lyrical and voluptuous poet.  Bernardo prophesied of his son, that, however he might surpass him in other respects, he would never equal him in sweetness; and he seems to have judged him rightly.  I have met with a passage in Torquato’s prose writings (but I cannot lay my hands on it), in which he expresses a singular predilection for verses full of the same vowel.  He seems, if I remember rightly, to have regarded it, not merely as a pleasing variety, which it is on occasion, but as a reigning principle.  Voltaire (I think, in his treatise on Epic Poetry) has noticed the multitude of o’s in the exordium of the Jerusalem.This apparent negligence seems to have been intentional.

  “Canto l’armi pietose e ’l capitano
    Che ’l gran Sepolero libero di Cristo;
  Molto egli opro col senno e con la mano,
    Molto soffri nel glorioso acquisto;
  E invan l’inferno a lui s’oppose; e invano
    S’armo d’Asia e di Libia il popol misto;
  Che il ciel gli die favore, e sotto ai santi
  Segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti.”