The popularity of Tasso’s epic with those Italians, who would inevitably know nothing of Dante, and very little of Ariosto, and the admiration expressed for it by poets or men of letters, are both well justified, though for different reasons. The _Jerusalem Delivered_ has a beauty of form which naturally delights people who have a real love of melody, while the matter is no less acceptable to all who are attracted rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by the great or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso himself afterwards expounded at length, is of the order which “bites” nobody, and we can watch the fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Godfrey and the crusaders, “as if we looked on that scene through an inverted telescope, whereby the whole was carried far away into the distance, the life-large figures compressed into brilliant miniatures, so clear, so real, yet tiny elf-like and beautified as well as lessened, their colours being now closer and brighter, the shadows and trivial features no longer visible.” Carlyle was kinder and less critical than when he classed the _Jerusalem Delivered_ with the _Nibelungen Lied_--for Dresden china shepherdesses are not more unlike the statues of Michelangelo than are the personages of Tasso to Kriemhilda or Hagen von Tronegk. Yet he has summed up the general impression left by the poem, as of a small, graceful, and, in spite of its great historical original, unimportant series of events transacting itself without passion. There is little life in its heroes and heroines. We never hear the “dreadful clamour” of battle, and the duels of the champions smack of the school of arms, for Tasso, though no fighter, was an accomplished swordsman. Yet the story is unquestionably pretty, and the tiny elf-like figures have charm. To the poet and the man of letters, though his fame is less in the world than it was, Tasso must always be admirable, because he was a thorough workman. He was the poet of a decline. The choice of words, the use of the file, the avoidance of improprieties of metre, are more with him than inspiration. But he did at least reap the benefit of all that his predecessors had done for the language, and he left a finished example of the “learned” poetry of Southern Europe in the later sixteenth century. [SN: _Giordano Bruno._]