, or Seven Days
of Creation_, a fragmentary poem in blank verse, which Tasso began
under the roof of his friend at Naples. This work is now very little
known, but it is worthy of being read, if only for the lofty dignity
of its style, and the beauty of some of its descriptive parts,
particularly the creation of light on the first day, and of the
firmament on the second, and the episode of the Phoenix on the fifth.
Its association with Milton's far grander work, as literary twins laid
for a while in the same cradle, will always invest it with deep
interest to the student.

Tasso occupied himself at the same time with an altered version of his
great poem, which he called the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_. He was
induced to undertake this work in order to triumph over his truculent
critics, the Della Cruscans, who had condemned the former version. In
the Imperial Library at Vienna is preserved the manuscript of this
version, with its numerous alterations and erasures, showing how
laborious the task of remodelling must have been. He suppressed the
touching incident of Olinda and Sophronia. He changed the name of
Rinaldo to Riccardo; and ruthlessly swept his pen through all the
flatteries, direct and indirect, which he had originally bestowed upon
the house of Este. There is hardly a single stanza that is not
changed. But in the process of revision he deprived his poem of all
life. Religious mysticism has been substituted for the refined
chivalry of the Crusades, and poetry and romance have been sacrificed
for classical regularity and religious orthodoxy. To any one familiar
with the original, the _Conquistata_ must be regarded as the most
melancholy book in any language; a sad monument of a noble genius
robbed of its power and depressed by calamity. And it is all the more
melancholy that the author himself was utterly unconscious of its
defects, and got so enamoured of what he considered his improvements,
that he wrote and published a discourse called the _Giudizio_--a cold
pedantic work, in which he explained the principles upon which he made
his alterations. In vain, however, did the author thus commit literary
suicide. His immortal poem had passed beyond the reach of revision,
and stamped itself too deeply upon the minds and hearts of his
countrymen to be effaced by any after version. And now the
_Conquistata_ has sunk into well-merited oblivion, while the
_Liberata_--"his youthful poetical sin," as he himself called it--is