The reader will not be surprised to find, that he who could thus confound monotony with music, and commence his greatest poem with it, is too often discordant in the rest of his versification.  It has been thought, that Milton might have taken from the Italians the grand musical account to which he turns a list of proper names, as in his enumerations of realms and deities; but I have been surprised to find how little the most musical of languages appears to have suggested to its poets anything of the sort.  I am not aware of it, indeed, in any poets but our own.  All others, from Homer, with his catalogue of leaders and ships, down to Metastasio himself, though he wrote for music, appear to have overlooked this opportunity of playing a voluntary of fine sounds, where they had no other theme on which to modulate.  Its inventor, as far as I am aware, is that great poet, Marlowe.[39]

There are faults of invention as well as style in the Jerusalem.  The Talking Bird, or bird that sings with a human voice (canto iv. 13), is a piece of inverisimilitude, which the author, perhaps, thought justifiable by the speaking horses of the ancients.  But the latter were moved supernaturally for the occasion, and for a very fine occasion.  Tasso’s bird is a mere born contradiction to nature and for no necessity.  The vulgar idea of the devil with horns and a tail (though the retention of it argued a genius in Tasso very inferior to that of Milton) is defensible, I think, on the plea of the German critics, that malignity should be made a thing low and deformed; but as much cannot be said for the storehouse in heaven, where St. Michael’s spear is kept with which he slew the dragon, and the trident which is used for making earthquakes (canto vii. st. 81).  The tomb which supernaturally comes out of the ground, inscribed with the name and virtues of Sueno (canto viii. st. 39), is worthy only of a pantomime; and the wizard in robes, with beech-leaves on his head, who walks dry-shod on water, and superfluously helps the knights on their way to Armida’s retirement (xiv. 33), is almost as ludicrous as the burlesque of the river-god in the Voyage of Bachaumont and Chapelle.

But let us not wonder, nevertheless, at the effect which the Jerusalem has had upon the world.  It could not have had it without great nature and power.  Rinaldo, in spite of his aberrations with Armida, knew the path to renown, and so did his poet.  Tasso’s epic, with all its faults, is a noble production, and justly considered one of the poems of the world.  Each of those poems hit some one great point of universal attraction, at least in their respective countries, and among the givers of fame in others.  Homer’s poem is that of action; Dante’s, of passion; Virgil’s, of judgment; Milton’s, of religion; Spenser’s, of poetry itself; Ariosto’s, of animal spirits (I do not mean as respects gaiety only, but in strength and readiness of accord with the whole play of nature);