s_, and the worse sacrifice of
consistency and truth of feeling,--lovers making long speeches on the
least fitting occasions, and ladies retaining their rosy cheeks in the
midst of fears of death,--is to be met with, more or less, throughout
the poem. I have no doubt they were the proximate cause of that general
corruption of taste which was afterwards completed by Marino, the
acquaintance and ardent admirer of Tasso when a boy. They have been laid
to the charge of Petrarch; but, without entering into the question, how
far and in what instances conceits may not be natural to lovers haunted,
as Petrarch was, with one idea, and seeing it in every thing they behold,
what had the great epic poet to do with the faults of the lyrical? And
what is to be said for his standing in need of the excuse of bad example?
Homer and Milton were in no such want. Virgil would not have copied the
tricks of Ovid. There is an effeminacy and self-reflection in Tasso,
analogous to his Rinaldo, in the enchanted garden; where the hero wore
a looking-glass by his side, in which he contemplated his sophisticated
self, and the meretricious beauty of his enchantress.[38] Agreeably to
this tendency to weakness, the style of Tasso, when not supported by
great occasions (and even the occasion itself sometimes fails him), is
too apt to fall into tameness and common-place,--to want movement and
picture; while, at the same time, with singular defect of enjoyment, it
does not possess the music which might be expected from a lyrical and
voluptuous poet. Bernardo prophesied of his son, that, however he might
surpass him in other respects, he would never equal him in sweetness;
and he seems to have judged him rightly. I have met with a passage in
Torquato's prose writings (but I cannot lay my hands on it), in which he
expresses a singular predilection for verses full of the same vowel.
He seems, if I remember rightly, to have regarded it, not merely as a
pleasing variety, which it is on occasion, but as a reigning principle.
Voltaire (I think, in his treatise on _Epic Poetry_) has noticed the
multitude of _o_'s in the exordium of the _Jerusalem_.This apparent
negligence seems to have been intentional.

"Canto l'armi pietose e 'l capitano
Che 'l gran Sepolero libero di Cristo;
Molto egli opro col senno e con la mano,
Molto soffri nel glorioso acquisto;
E invan l'inferno a lui s'oppose; e invano
S'armo d'Asia e di Libia il popol misto;
Che