of humor more or less predominant in the Morgante Maggiore, the Orlando Innamorato, and the Orlando Furioso.  This element might almost be regarded as inseparable from the species.  Yet two circumstances contributed to alter the character of Italian Romance after the publication of the Furioso.  One of these was the unapproachable perfection of that poem.  No one could hope to surpass Ariosto in his own style, or to give a fresh turn to his humor without passing into broad burlesque.  The romantic poet had therefore to choose between sinking into parody with Folengo and Aretino, or soaring into the sublimities of solemn art.  Another circumstance was the keen interest aroused in academic circles by Trissino’s unsuccessful epic, and by the discussion of heroic poetry which it stimulated.  The Italian nation was becoming critical, and this critical spirit lent itself readily to experiments in hybrid styles of composition which aimed at combining the graces of the Romantic with the dignity of the Heroic poem.  The most meritorious of these hybrids was Bernardo Tasso’s Amadigi, a long romance in octave stanzas, sustained upon a grave tone throughout, and distinguished from the earlier romantic epics by a more obvious unity of subject.  Bernardo Tasso possessed qualities of genius and temper which suited his proposed task.  Deficient in humor, he had no difficulty in eliminating that element from the Amadigi.  Chivalrous sentiment took the place of irony; scholarly method supplied the want of wayward fancy.

It was just at this point that the young Torquato Tasso made his first essay in poetry.  He had inherited his father’s temperament, its want of humor, its melancholy, its aristocratic sensitiveness.  At the age of seventeen he was already a ripe scholar, versed in the critical questions which then agitated learned coteries in Italy.  The wilding graces and the freshness of the Romantic Epic, as conceived by Boiardo and perfected by Ariosto, had forever disappeared.  To ’recapture that first fine careless rapture’ was impossible.  Contemporary conditions of society and thought rendered any attempt to do so futile.  Italy had passed into a different stage of culture; and the representative poem of Tasso’s epoch was imperatively forced to assume a different character.  Its type already existed in the Amadigi, though Bernardo Tasso had not the genius to disengage it clearly, or to render it attractive.  How Torquato, while still a student in his teens at Padua, attacked the problem of narrative poetry, appears distinctly in his preface to Rinaldo.  ‘I believe,’ he says, ’that you, my gentle readers, will not take it amiss if I have diverged from the path of modern poets, and have sought to approach the best among the ancients.  You shall not, however, find that I am bound by the precise rules of Aristotle, which often render those poems irksome which might otherwise have yielded you much pleasure.  I have only followed