among the shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida’s garden.  Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Tasso bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the last, is poetically of no importance whatsoever.  Argante, Solimano, Tisaferno, excite our interest, and win the sympathy we cannot spare the saintly hero; and in the death of Solimano Tasso’s style, for once, verges upon tragic sublimity.

What Tasso aimed at in the Gerusalemme was nobility.  This quality had not been prominent in Ariosto’s art.  If he could attain it, his ambition to rival the Orlando Furioso would be satisfied.  One main condition of success Tasso brought to the achievement.  His mind itself was eminently noble, incapable of baseness, fixed on fair and worthy objects of contemplation.  Yet the personal nobility which distinguished him as a thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type.  He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature.  His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody.  In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets.  This was consistent with the tendency of the Classical Revival; but since the subject to be dignified by epic style was Christian and mediaeval, a discord between matter and manner amounting almost to insincerity resulted.  Some examples will make the meaning of this criticism more apparent.  When Goffredo rejects the embassy of Atlete and Argante, he declares his firm intention of delivering Jerusalem in spite of overwhelming perils.  The crusaders can but perish: 

    Noi morirem, ma non morremo inulti. (i. 86.)

This of course is a reminiscence of Dido’s last words, and the difference between the two situations creates a disagreeable incongruity.  The nod of Jove upon Olympus is translated to express the fiat of the Almighty (xiii. 74); Gabriel is tricked out in the plumes and colors of Mercury (i. 13-15); the very angels sinning round the throne become ‘dive sirene’ (xiv. 9); the armory of heaven is described in terms which reduce Michael’s spear and the arrows of pestilence to ordinary weapons (vii. 81); Hell is filled with harpies, centaurs, hydras, pythons, the common lumber of classical Tartarus (iv. 5); the angel sent to cure Goffredo’s wound culls dittany on Ida (xi. 72); the heralds, interposing between Tancredi and Argante, hold pacific scepters and have naught of chivalry (vi. 51).  It may be said that both Dante before Tasso, and Milton after him, employed similar classical language in dealing with Christian and mediaeval motives.  But this will hardly serve as an excuse; for Dante and Milton communicate so intense a conviction of religious earnestness that their Latinisms, even though incongruous, are recognized as the mere