When comparing these two memorable wars, and the poetical masterpieces that have celebrated them, we cannot but think that the subject of the “Jerusalem Delivered” is more wonderful than that of the “Iliad.” We may still further say, that the heroes of Tasso are more interesting than those of Homer, and their exploits less fabulous. The cause which armed the Greeks was much less important than that which actuated the Christians. The latter, in some sort, took up arms for the assistance of misfortune and oppressed weakness. They went to defend a religion able to make them sensible of ills that were endured far from them, and to make them find brothers in regions unknown to them. This character of sociability is not to be found in any belief of the ancients. The Crusaders exhibited another spectacle with which antiquity was unacquainted—the union of religious humility with the love of glory. History shows us constantly these haughty heroes, the terror of Asia and the Mussulmans, bending their victorious brows to the dust, and marching from conquest to conquest, covered with the sack of penitence. The priests, who exhorted them in battle, only raised their courage by reproaching them with their sins. When they met with reverses, a thousand voices were raised among them to accuse their own misconduct; and when they were victorious, it was God alone that gave them the victory, and religion forbade their claiming glory from it.[215] The historian may be permitted to think that this difference between the heroes of the “Iliad” and those of the holy war is not sufficiently marked in the poem of “Jerusalem Delivered.”[216] Another reproach may likewise be addressed to the bard of Rinaldo and Godfrey; the ideas of magic and gallantry which he has too freely lavished upon his poem are not in accordance with the truth of history. Magic, which is nothing but a sort of degenerated superstition, and which only deals with small things, was but little known to the Crusaders. Their superstition, however gross, had something noble and grand in it, which associated them sufficiently with the spirit of the epopée, without the poet having anything to alter; their character and manners were grave and austere, and exceedingly well suited to the dignity of a religious epic. It was not till long after the first crusade that magic formed any part of the superstition of the Franks, or that their warlike manners abandoned the prominently epic character which distinguished them, to adopt the romantic character which they have preserved in all books of chivalry. It appears to us that we discover in Tasso much more of the manners of the times in which he lived than of those of the end of the eleventh century, the period of the events which form the subject of his poem.