Ariosto became a rage and a model. During the sixteenth century every Paladin and every Knight of the Round Table had his poet. Our own Spenser, deeply read as he was in Italian, had not only read Ariosto, but in all probability more than one imitator of Ariosto, and it is not for nothing that so many characters in the _Faerie Queene_, such as Archimago and Orgoglio, Duessa, and Fidissa, bear Italian names, names that so well fit the land of romance which the Italians had annexed for their own. In 1591 appeared the well-known translation by Sir John Harington. Torquato Tasso, who lived during the latter half of the sixteenth century (1544-1595), and who also wrote at Ferrara, composed the world-famed epic _Gerusalemme Liberata_, or “Jerusalem Delivered.” It is the epic or Iliad of the first great Crusade, in which Godfrey of Boulogne, who is the hero—_Goffredo_ indeed was the earlier name of the epic—took back the sacred city of Jerusalem from the Saracens. It would be vain to attempt here to give an idea of this splendid heroic poem, of its vigour, of the beauty of language in its episodes, of the romantic experiences of the knightly Tancred and the heroine Clorinda, of the exploits, the miracles, the magic, and the enchanted forest. That it greatly influenced Spenser—whose Bower of Acrasia, for instance, is Tasso’s garden of Armida—that it, along with the _Iliad_, the _Aeneid_, and the _Divine Comedy_, helped to build up the _Paradise Lost_ of Milton, is one of its claims upon our special notice here. To Elizabethan readers the work was made accessible through the famous translation of Fairfax (1600), and by others of less renown. To Tasso also belongs an unfinished poem on the Creation, _Il Mondo Creato_, with which Milton was manifestly well acquainted. Whether or not the English poet was also influenced in his _Paradise Lost_ by another Italian production, the _Adamo_ of Andreini, is uncertain.