Before the time of Tasso, Peter the Hermit would have been deemed a foolish enthusiast; later, he would have been sent to a lunatic asylum.  But just at the time when Tasso wrote there was much, especially in Italy, of that spirit which roused and quickened Europe in the eleventh century, much that appealed to the natural poetry in the human heart.  The recent victory of the Christian forces at the famous battle of Lepanto checked the spread of Mohammedanism in Eastern Europe, and turned men’s thoughts back into the old channel of the Crusades; so that Gregory XIII., who ascended the pontifical throne about the time that Tasso had resumed the writing of his Gerusalemme, had actually planned an expedition to the Holy Land, like that which his predecessor, Urban II., had sent out.  And one of the principal events which the poet witnessed after his arrival at Ferrara, when the marriage rejoicings were over, was the departure of the reigning duke with a company of three hundred gentlemen of his court, arrayed in all the pomp and splendour of the famous Paladins of the first Crusade, to assist the Emperor of Austria in repelling an invasion of the Turks into Hungary.  Many of the noble houses of Europe at this time were extremely anxious to trace their origin to the Crusades; and the vanity of the house of Este required that Tasso should make the great hero of his epic—­the brave and chivalrous Rinaldo—­an ancestor of their family.  The scenes and associations, too, in the midst of which his daily life was spent, helped him to realise vividly the pageantry connected with the heroes of his epic.

Thus happy in the choice of a subject, and favoured by the spirit of the time and the circumstances in which he was placed, Tasso gave himself up to the composition of his poem with a most absorbing devotion.  Like Virgil, he first sketched out his work in prose, and on this groundwork elaborated the charms of colouring and harmony which distinguish the poem.  So carefully did he study the military art of his day that all his battles and contests are scientifically described, and are in entire accordance with the most rigorous rules of war; and so thoroughly did he make himself acquainted with the topography of the Holy Land by the aid of books, that Chateaubriand, who read the Gerusalemme under the walls of Jerusalem, was struck with the fidelity of the local descriptions.  Tasso occasionally sought relief from his great task by the composition of sonnets and lyrics, which were published in the Rime of the Paduan Academy, and contributed to make him still more popular all over Italy.  He also took part in those literary disputations in public which were characteristic of the age; and for three days in the Academy of Ferrara, in the presence of the court, defended against both sexes fifty “Amorous Conclusions” which he had drawn up—­a form of controversy which seems to have been a relic of the courts or parliaments of love, very popular