The spiritual motive of the Crusades is finely typified in the character of Godfrey, who like our own loved Lord Roberts, initiated every fresh plan with prayer; whose incorruptible soul saw nothing of the material openings that a Crusade might offer—openings that were the very _raison-d’-être_ of crusading to the shrewd merchants of Venice in later years—Godfrey, to whom was unthinkable the mere notion of such bargaining and traffic as Frederic of Swabia was to employ a century later. “We are not out for gain,” he says to Altamoro of Samarcand, “we are not traders, but Crusaders.” Che della vita altrui prezzo non cerco; Guerreggio an Asia, non cambio o merco. ... We should like to picture Tasso weaving into his stately verse, descriptions of submarine warfare, of the advance of the tanks, of an artillery barrage on a fifty-mile front: and we could find in _Gerusalemme Liberata_ a starting-point for most of these. But space permits us only two more points. The Hun-spirit, and the glory of our Boy-heroes, are both depicted in Tasso’s magic tapestry: the one succinctly and sternly, the other more diffusely and with all the glamour of his genius. The brutal measures devised—some of them not put into practice—by the Sultan against the subject Christian population of Jerusalem, and all the other infidel horrors of oppression and cruelty which Tasso evidently puts forth as the _ne plus ultra_ of bygone barbarism, have been matched and exceeded by those wreaked upon Christian populations by the modern Turk with the connivance of his Teutonic ally; matched and exceeded by the votaries of the “good German God” themselves, upon defenceless civil populations of invaded districts, and equally defenceless prisoners of war. But the spirit of “Frightfulness” itself is sharply sketched with a single stroke of the pen in the description of one of the leaders of the Egyptian army (vii. 22): “no true knight, but a fierce, murderous robber.” Albiazar ch’ è fiero Omicida ladron, non cavaliero. But now that victory is won, and those horrors (save for the deep wounds of Europe) seem an evil dream, we fain would forget the unforgettable, lest we retard the work of reconciliation. Let us finish on a happier note, with Rinaldo—Rinaldo who, as Spenser says in his Prefatory Letter to the _Faëry Queen_, represents “the Vertues of a private man,” even as Godfrey those of a good governour. Rinaldo’s very existence is, doubtless, largely due to “dynastic reasons”: to the necessity of flattering, that is, the House of Este; yet he concentrates in himself all the elements of the perfect knight, the pattern of chivalry, as conceived by Tasso. If the desire to please a patron, Alfonso d’ Este, brought Rinaldo into the world, did not a similar motive assist at the birth of Virgil’s _Pius Aeneas_? Both Aeneas and Rinaldo are strong enough to “stand on their own feet.”