so far as
character goes, from a race of giants to a brood of pigmies.

Modern partiality cannot claim for Tasso the merit of having conceived a
band of heroes whose characters were as strongly marked, or boldly drawn,
as those of the Grecian bard; yet may it justly claim for the Italian poet
the second honours. Tasso did not draw his characters from nature, like
Homer; he lived at a period when the manners of the heroic age had passed
away, and the recollections of it were preserved only in the stanzas of
poetry and the romances of the Troubadours; yet did the force of his
genius, the elevation of his sentiments, the loftiness of his conceptions,
in a great measure supply the defect, and produce a magnificent, and to
this day unequalled, picture of the chivalry of modern Europe. Godfrey of
Bouillon is the model of a Christian hero whose arm has been devoted to
the sacred lance; antiquity did not, and could not, conceive any such
character. Hector is the nearest approach to it; but the patriotism of
the Trojan chief is mingled with his domestic affections; it is for his
father, his wife, his child, his hearth, his country, that he fights. In
Godfrey, all these affections, warm and ennobling as they are, appear to
be obliterated by the perpetual sense of a sacred duty superior to them
all--by the intensity of the pious fervour which had concentrated all
earthly affections. He is the personification of the Church militant,
combating for its Saviour's cause. The profound feelings, the
self-negation, the martyr-like spirit which had been nursed for centuries
amidst the solitude of the cloister, appears in him brought forth into
action, and producing the most intense enthusiasm, yet regulated by the
caution of Ulysses, combined with the foresight of Agamemnon, sustained by
the constancy of Ajax.

Rinaldo, youthful, vehement, impassioned, is the ideal of a hero not yet
weaned from the passions of the world. Vehement, capricious, and
irascible, he disturbs, like Achilles, the council of the chiefs by his
wrath, and is seduced by the beauty of Armida to abandon the cause of the
cross; yet even in her enchanted gardens, and when surrounded by all that
can fascinate the imagination and allure the senses, the sparks of a noble
nature are not extinct in his breast; he is recalled to his duty by the
sight of her warriors; he flies the arms of the syren; he penetrates with
invincible courage the enchanted forest; and when he descends