il ciel gli die favore, e sotto ai santi
Segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti."

The reader will not be surprised to find, that he who could thus confound
monotony with music, and commence his greatest poem with it, is too often
discordant in the rest of his versification. It has been thought, that
Milton might have taken from the Italians the grand musical account to
which he turns a list of proper names, as in his enumerations of realms
and deities; but I have been surprised to find how little the most
musical of languages appears to have suggested to its poets anything of
the sort. I am not aware of it, indeed, in any poets but our own. All
others, from Homer, with his catalogue of leaders and ships, down to
Metastasio himself, though he wrote for music, appear to have overlooked
this opportunity of playing a voluntary of fine sounds, where they had no
other theme on which to modulate. Its inventor, as far as I am aware, is
that great poet, Marlowe.[39]

There are faults of invention as well as style in the _Jerusalem_. The
Talking Bird, or bird that sings with a human voice (canto iv. 13), is a
piece of inverisimilitude, which the author, perhaps, thought justifiable
by the speaking horses of the ancients. But the latter were moved
supernaturally for the occasion, and for a very fine occasion. Tasso's
bird is a mere born contradiction to nature and for no necessity. The
vulgar idea of the devil with horns and a tail (though the retention
of it argued a genius in Tasso very inferior to that of Milton) is
defensible, I think, on the plea of the German critics, that malignity
should be made a thing low and deformed; but as much cannot be said for
the storehouse in heaven, where St. Michael's spear is kept with which
he slew the dragon, and the trident which is used for making earthquakes
(canto vii. st. 81). The tomb which supernaturally comes out of the
ground, inscribed with the name and virtues of Sueno (canto viii. st.
39), is worthy only of a pantomime; and the wizard in robes, with
beech-leaves on his head, who walks dry-shod on water, and superfluously
helps the knights on their way to Armida's retirement (xiv. 33), is
almost as ludicrous as the burlesque of the river-god in the _Voyage_ of
Bachaumont and Chapelle.

But let us not wonder, nevertheless, at the effect which the _Jerusalem_
has had upon the world. It could not have had it without great nature and
power. Rinaldo, in spite of his aberrations wit