ting forth its utmost strength to drive back the Ottoman and the heretic; and although, when Tasso began his Jerusalem, he could have foreseen neither Lepanto nor the St. Bartholomew, it is a remarkable instance of the harmony which pervades all human affairs, that both should have happened ere he had completed it. Had either been the subject of his poem, the result would have been utter failure; but the great theme of the Crusades exhibits the dominant thought of his own day exalted to a commanding elevation, set at an awful distance, and purged of all contemporary littleness; transfigured in the radiance of poetry and history. A nobler subject for epic song could not well be found, save for the defect which it shares with almost all epics which have been created by study and reflection, and have not, like the Iliad, grown spontaneously out of the heart and mind of a great people. The principal action is insufficient for the poem, and needs to be eked out and adorned by copious episodes. The Æneid would present a poor figure without the burning of Troy, the death of Dido, and Æneas's descent to the shades; the Jerusalem is still more indebted to Clorinda and Armida, and the embellishment is still more loosely connected with the poem's ostensible purpose. Tasso's genius was in many respects truly epical; yet, the nearer he approaches lyric or pastoral, the more thoroughly he seems at home. That his Saracens should be more interesting than his Christians, and his Christians most interesting when least Christian, was perhaps inevitable. It is a proof of the essential excellence of human nature that, unless in very extreme cases, its sympathies are always most readily enlisted by the weaker side. Homer himself
