insufferable: no power of genius could create an interest in behalf of Apollo and Venus, no longer believed in by the poet or by his readers; nor would the achievements of giants and witches, if celebrated by one born in this "age of reason," find mercy from criticism, or indulgence even from the vulgar students of our _penny_ literature. Monk Lewis's Tales of Wonder, and the monstrosities of the German drama, have been long ago forgotten; the "Michael Scott" of the great minstrel "of that ilk!" alone keeps his ground; but all the other preternatural machines of the same creative hand would have perished utterly, had they not been associated with records of the doings and sufferings of beings of flesh and blood like ourselves, though existing in a state of semi-barbarous society exceedingly different from our own. The "Rinaldo" was the first form of the abstract conception of a regular poem, at once to rival Virgil and Ariosto, which originated in the mind of Torquato while yet a youth of seventeen, but was not wholly developed till, at twice that age, he had produced the "Gerusalemme Liberata." All the characteristics of his peculiar genius are perceptible in the incidents, style, embellishments, and conduct of this juvenile essay; which, contrasted with the matured form and perfect majesty of that later offspring of his genius, is, as his own Gabriel, sent to comfort Godfrey, at the opening of the siege of Jerusalem:--take the image in Fairfax's version,-- "A stripling seem'd he, thrice five winter's old, And radiant beams adorn'd his locks of gold,"-- compared with Milton's "Raphael," "in prime of manhood, where youth ended," alighting on the eastern cliff of Paradise, where,-- "like Maia's son he stood, And shook his wings, that heavenly fragrance fill'd The circuit wide."[40]