excite, frequently he degenerates into
witticisms, which abruptly destroy the pathetic. That he abounds with
images of too florid a kind; affected turns; conceits and frivolous
thoughts; which, far from being adapted to his Jerusalem, could hardly
be supportable in his 'Aminta.' So that all this, opposed to the
gravity, the sobriety, the majesty of Virgil, what is it but tinsel
compared with gold?"

The merits of Tasso seem here precisely discriminated; and this
criticism must be valuable to the lovers of poetry. The errors of Tasso
were national.

In Venice the gondoliers know by heart long passages from Ariosto and
Tasso, and often chant them with a peculiar melody. Goldoni, in his
life, notices the gondolier returning with him to the city: "He turned
the prow of the gondola towards the city, singing all the way the
twenty-sixth stanza of the sixteenth canto of the Jerusalem Delivered."
The late Mr. Barry once chanted to me a passage of Tasso in the manner
of the gondoliers; and I have listened to such from one who in his youth
had himself been a gondolier. An anonymous gentleman has greatly obliged
me with his account of the recitation of these poets by the gondoliers
of Venice.

There are always two concerned, who alternately sing the strophes. We
know the melody eventually by Rousseau, to whose songs it is printed; it
has properly no melodious movement, and is a sort of medium between the
canto fermo and the canto figurato; it approaches to the former by
recitativical declamation, and to the latter by passages and course, by
which one syllable is detained and embellished.

I entered a gondola by moonlight: one singer placed himself forwards,
and the other aft, and thus proceeded to Saint Giorgio. One began the
song: when he had ended his strophe the other took up the lay, and so
continued the song alternately. Throughout the whole of it, the same
notes invariably returned; but, according to the subject matter of the
strophe, they laid a greater or a smaller stress, sometimes on one, and
sometimes on another note, and indeed changed the enunciation of the
whole strophe, as the object of the poem altered.

On the whole, however, their sounds were hoarse and screaming: they
seemed, in the manner of all rude uncivilised men, to make the
excellency of their singing consist in the force of their voice: one
seemed desirous of conquering the other by the strength of his lungs,
and so far from receiving delight from