Sometimes his imagination works simply on a gorgeous description, as when he depicts for us the pageant of the rival armies: the Crusading host reviewed by Godfrey beneath the walls of Tortosa (i. 36 _sqq._), and the Egyptian army by the King of Egypt (xvii. 9 _sqq._) in the frontier town of Gaza, famous—as our own troops realised to their cost in the early stages of the Palestinian campaign—for its “Immensi solitudini d’ arena,” (xvii. 1). Marvellous as are these descriptions, and more full of colour—be it conceded—than any modern massing of khaki-clad armed men, Tasso would have had greatly vaster, if not more varied, groups to depict on our Eastern-European front when the Russian army was still a factor, and vaster still in these last months on the West. And for picturesqueness and glamour, our Oriental battlefields and movements of troops offer scenes which would run even Tasso’s gorgeous pages very close. Take for instance the picture, drawn by the Australian official correspondent, of the entry of the allied troops into Damascus on the first days of October, 1918— “Past applauding multitudes ... rode the dashing Australian Light Horsemen, followed by brilliant cavalry from the Indian Highlands, then by Yeomanry from the English Shires, black-skinned French Colonials from North Africa on their barb stallions, sturdy New Zealand machine-gunners and batteries from England and Scotland.” These, with the “swarthy Hedjaz Arabs beautifully mounted on black and white horses and on camels ... formed a magnificent demonstration of the might of the British and allied forces.” How well this would look in Tasso’s sonorous verse! But the characteristic products of Tasso’s fancy are more imaginative than these, outrageously imaginative, one might call them, though they have, withal, a dramatic appropriateness, since he is treading on Moslem soil, and his magicians and fair women, his bejewelled halls beneath the river-bed, his enchanted forest and spellbound island-mountain give us the true savour of the Arabian Nights. But was it ever so true as it is to-day that “truth is stranger than fiction?” Was ever enchanted forest more repellent in its horrors than some of those stricken woods on our Western Front? If it had fallen to Tasso to describe in his verse our modern air-fighting, would it not have afforded his genius far more scope than was offered even by the wonderful description of the journey of the enchanted boat in which the two paladins sail out along the coast of Africa and between the Pillars of Hercules into the great Ocean to rescue Rinaldo (xv. 6 _sqq._)? Or Ismeno’s magic car, mist-swathed, and leaving no track upon the sand? When, in his first Canto (i. 14, 15), he depicts the Angel Gabriel cutting his way through winds and clouds, hovering over Lebanon, and then swooping down upon Tortosa—