Apart from the failings without which he would hardly have been a poet, and the infirmities for which it would be unjust to make him responsible, Tasso’s deportment throughout life was that of an amiable, high-minded, and accomplished gentleman. Two defects alone produce a painful impression--the entire lack of any sense of humour, and the apparent indifference to all public interests outside of court and ecclesiastical life. The former of these was congenital, irremediable, and bitterly expiated by the undignified predicaments in which it involved him; the latter would not have existed if he had lived in a better age. He did, indeed, like Spenser and Tennyson, attribute a didactic and allegorical purpose to his poem which may have been patent to his own mind, but with which no reader, if not a commentator also, ever concerned himself. Yet the significance of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ does not solely consist in the beauty of the language and the exquisiteness of the characters: although an artificial, it is in some sense a national epic. Thanks mainly to the pressure of foreign tyrants, Protestantism and the Renaissance both had for the time been crushed in Italy, and the Italian poet who would be national must write in the spirit of the reaction. Catholicism was putting forth its utmost strength to drive back the Ottoman and the heretic; and although, when Tasso began his _Jerusalem_, he could have foreseen neither Lepanto nor the St. Bartholomew, it is a remarkable instance of the harmony which pervades all human affairs, that both should have happened ere he had completed it. Had either been the subject of his poem, the result would have been utter failure; but the great theme of the Crusades exhibits the dominant thought of his own day exalted to a commanding elevation, set at an awful distance, and purged of all contemporary littleness; transfigured in the radiance of poetry and history. A nobler subject for epic song could not well be found, save for the defect which it shares with almost all epics which have been created by study and reflection, and have not, like the _Iliad_, grown spontaneously out of the heart and mind of a great people. The principal action is insufficient for the poem, and needs to be eked out and adorned by copious episodes. The _Æneid_ would present a poor figure without the burning of Troy, the death of Dido, and Æneas’s descent to the shades; the _Jerusalem_ is still more indebted to Clorinda and Armida, and the embellishment is still more loosely connected with the poem’s ostensible purpose. Tasso’s genius was in many respects truly epical; yet, the nearer he approaches lyric or pastoral, the more thoroughly he seems at home. That his Saracens should be more interesting than his Christians, and his Christians most interesting when least Christian, was perhaps inevitable. It is a proof of the essential excellence of human nature that, unless in very extreme cases, its sympathies are