a new character in regard to the one; and she is as different from the painted hag of the Orlando as youth, beauty, and patriotic intention can make her.  She is not very sentimental; but all the passion in the world has sympathised with her; and it was manly and honest in the poet not to let her Paganism and vehemence hinder him from doing justice to her claims as a human being and a deserted woman.  Her fate is left in so pleasing a state of doubt, that we gladly avail ourselves of it to suppose her married to Rinaldo, and becoming the mother of a line of Christian princes.  I wish they had treated her poet half so well as she would infallibly have treated him herself.

But the singer of the Crusades can be strong as well as gentle.  You discern in his battles and single combats the poet ambitious of renown, and the accomplished swordsman.  The duel of Tancred and Argantes, in which the latter is slain, is as earnest and fiery writing throughout as truth and passion could desire; that of Tancred and Clorinda is also very powerful as well as affecting; and the whole siege of Jerusalem is admirable for the strength of its interest.  Every body knows the grand verse (not, however, quite original) that summons the devils to council, “Chiama gli abitator,” &c.; and the still grander, though less original one, describing the desolations of time, “Giace l’alta Cartago."[40] The forest filled with supernatural terrors by a magician, in order that the Christians may not cut wood from it to make their engines of war, is one of the happiest pieces of invention in romance.  It is founded in as true human feeling as those of Ariosto, and is made an admirable instrument for the aggrandizement of the character of Rinaldo.  Godfrey’s attestation of all time, and of the host of heaven, when he addresses his army in the first canto, is in the highest spirit of epic magnificence.  So is the appearance of the celestial armies, together with that of the souls of the slain Christian warriors, in the last canto, where they issue forth in the air to assist the entrance into the conquered city.  The classical poets are turned to great and frequent account throughout the poem; and yet the work has a strong air of originality, partly owing to the subject, partly to the abundance of love-scenes, and to a certain compactness in the treatment of the main story, notwithstanding the luxuriance of the episodes.  The Jerusalem Delivered is stately, well-ordered, full of action and character, sometimes sublime, always elegant, and very interesting-more so, I think, as a whole, and in a popular sense, than any other story in verse, not excepting the Odyssey.  For the exquisite domestic attractiveness of the second Homeric poem is injured, like the hero himself, by too many diversions from the main point.  There is an interest, it is true, in that very delay; but we become too much used to the disappointment.  In the epic of Tasso the reader constantly desires to learn how the success of the enterprise is to be brought about; and he scarcely loses sight of any of the persons but he wishes to see them again.  Even in the love-scenes, tender and absorbed as they are, we feel that the heroes are fighters, or going to fight.  When you are introduced to Armida in the Bower of Bliss, it is by warriors who come to take her lover away to battle.