The whole course of the poem is comprised in the campaign of 1093, when the Christian army, assembled on the plain of Tortosa, marched towards Jerusalem, which they besieged and captured. From the commencement of the poem, the most tender sentiments are combined with the action, and love has been assigned a nobler part than had been given to it in any other epic poem. Love, enthusiastic, respectful, and full of homage, was an essential characteristic of chivalry and the source of the noblest actions. While with the heroes of the classic epic it was a weakness, with the Christian knights it was a devotion. In this work are happily combined the classic and romantic styles. It is classic in its plan, romantic in its heroes; it is conceived in the spirit of antiquity, and executed in the spirit of medieval romance. It has the beauty which results from unity of design and from the harmony of all its parts, united with the romantic form, which falls in with the feelings, the passions, and the recollections of Europeans. Notwithstanding some defects, which must be attributed rather to the taste of his age than to his genius, in the history of literature Tasso may be placed by the side of Homer and Virgil. 5. LYRIC POETRY.--Lyric poetry, which had been brought to such perfection by Petrarch in the fourteenth century, but almost lost sight of in the fifteenth, was cultivated by all the Italian poets of this period. Petrarch became the model, which every aspirant endeavored to imitate. Hence arose a host of poetasters, who wrote with considerable elegance, but without the least power of imagination. We must not, however, confound with the servile imitators of Petrarch those who took nothing from his school but purity of language and elegance of style, and who consecrated the lyre not to love alone, but to patriotism and religion. First of these are Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici, in whose ballads and stanzas the language of Petrarch reappeared with all its beauty and harmony. Later, Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Molza (1489-1544), Tarsia (1476-1535), Guidiccioni (1480-1541), Della Casa (1503-1556), Costanzo (1507-1585), and later still, Chiabrera (1552-1637), attempted to restore Italian poetry to its primitive elegance. Their sonnets and canzoni contributed much to the revival of a purer style, although their elegance is often too elaborate and their thoughts and feelings too artificial. Besides these, Ariosto, Tasso, Machiavelli, and Michael Angelo, whose genius was practiced in more ambitious tasks, did not disdain to shape and polish such diminutive gems as the canzone, the madrigal, and the sonnet.