appreciate the full interest of the Crusades, not too near to be
absorbed in observation and engrossed in the immediate results; not
too far off to lose the sympathy for the religious chivalry which
inspired the Holy War. Earlier, in the intensely prosaic period that
immediately succeeded, the romance of the Crusades was gone; later,
Europe was girding itself for the sterner task of reformation. Before
the time of Tasso, Peter the Hermit would have been deemed a foolish
enthusiast; later, he would have been sent to a lunatic asylum. But
just at the time when Tasso wrote there was much, especially in Italy,
of that spirit which roused and quickened Europe in the eleventh
century, much that appealed to the natural poetry in the human heart.
The recent victory of the Christian forces at the famous battle of
Lepanto checked the spread of Mohammedanism in Eastern Europe, and
turned men's thoughts back into the old channel of the Crusades; so
that Gregory XIII., who ascended the pontifical throne about the time
that Tasso had resumed the writing of his _Gerusalemme_, had actually
planned an expedition to the Holy Land, like that which his
predecessor, Urban II., had sent out. And one of the principal events
which the poet witnessed after his arrival at Ferrara, when the
marriage rejoicings were over, was the departure of the reigning duke
with a company of three hundred gentlemen of his court, arrayed in all
the pomp and splendour of the famous Paladins of the first Crusade, to
assist the Emperor of Austria in repelling an invasion of the Turks
into Hungary. Many of the noble houses of Europe at this time were
extremely anxious to trace their origin to the Crusades; and the
vanity of the house of Este required that Tasso should make the great
hero of his epic--the brave and chivalrous Rinaldo--an ancestor of
their family. The scenes and associations, too, in the midst of which
his daily life was spent, helped him to realise vividly the pageantry
connected with the heroes of his epic.

Thus happy in the choice of a subject, and favoured by the spirit of
the time and the circumstances in which he was placed, Tasso gave
himself up to the composition of his poem with a most absorbing
devotion. Like Virgil, he first sketched out his work in prose, and on
this groundwork elaborated the charms of colouring and harmony which
distinguish the poem. So carefully did he study the military art of
his day that all his battles and contests