His narrative poems are four in number; the _Rinaldo,_ the _Gerusalemme Liberata,_ the _Gerusalemme Conquistata,_ and the _Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato,_ a long work in blank verse on the subject of the Creation. His _Rinaldo_ is remarkable because it was written in such early youth; his _Gerusalemme Conquistata_ was admitted even by his admirers to be an utter failure. It has only one striking passage, a prophecy of evil to the house of Bourbon, which seems clearly to foretell the crimes and horrors of the French Revolution, and which deserves to rank among poetical prophecies next to the celebrated prediction of the discovery of America in the tragedy of _Medea_ attributed to Seneca. The _Sette Giornate_ furnished some hints to Milton when he came to the description of the Creation of the World in _Paradise Lost._ It has, however, no intrinsic merit to recommend it, being heavy and uninteresting to the last degree. These three poems had hardly vitality enough to keep them alive until the close of the Century in which they were written, and to modern readers they are quite dead. And yet the subjects were of sufficient interest to afford brilliant opportunities of displaying the powers of a great writer. We cannot help asking the question, can he be a great poet who allowed such brilliant opportunities to escape? His pastoral play, _Aminta,_ has much sweetness and freshness of style; his tragedy, _Torrismondo,_ has some touches that lead us to think that under happier circumstances and with a mind less pre-occupied with his own distresses, he might have become a fine dramatist; but the shepherds and nymphs of the _Aminta_ seem vapid and mawkish to readers of the present day; and the _Torrismondo_ has not that convincing power that a tragedy ought to possess. In all these works, lyric, epic, and dramatic, Tasso's style, though sweet and flowing in the earlier productions, is strangely devoid of originality, and, therefore, of colour; and no writer was more deeply imbued with the conventional phraseology of the poetry of his age. Thought and style are alike devoid of those vivid touches that command admiration and ensure immortality. We are left under the impression that the poet is not fixing all his powers of mind on his verse, and that his attention is largely engaged elsewhere. This absence of full power is the only trace in his poems of the disordered state of his mind. Many poets, whose sanity has never been questioned, have passages far more morbid and eccentric than any that can be found in Tasso's pages. He never indulges in wild flights of fancy, the order of his thoughts is lucidity itself; and there are no incoherent and very few exaggerated metaphors. On the contrary, they would rather gain by a little more irregularity. They are so logically thought out as to become occasionally almost exasperating. Thus it will be seen that his claims to rank as a great poet rest entirely on the _Gerusalemme Liberata._