confesses himself to have been too lyrical--that is, to have written
beneath the dignity of heroic verse--in his episodes of Sophronia,
Erminia, and Armida. His story is not so pleasing as Ariosto's; he
is too flatulent sometimes, and sometimes too dry; many times
unequal, and almost always forced; and, besides, is full of
conceits, points of epigram, and witticisms; all which are not only
below the dignity of heroic verse, but contrary to its nature:
Virgil and Homer have not one of them. And those who are guilty of
so boyish an ambition in so grave a subject are so far from being
considered as heroic poets that they ought to be turned down from
Homer to the "Anthologia," from Virgil to Martial and Owen's
Epigrams, and from Spenser to Flecknoe--that is, from the top to the
bottom of all poetry. But to return to Tasso: he borrows from the
invention of Boiardo, and in his alteration of his poem, which is
infinitely for the worse, imitates Homer so very servilely that (for
example) he gives the King of Jerusalem fifty sons, only because
Homer had bestowed the like number on King Priam; he kills the
youngest in the same manner; and has provided his hero with a
Patroclus, under another name, only to bring him back to the wars
when his friend was killed. The French have performed nothing in
this kind which is not far below those two Italians, and subject to
a thousand more reflections, without examining their "St. Louis,"
their "Pucelle," or their "Alaric." The English have only to boast
of Spenser and Milton, who neither of them wanted either genius or
learning to have been perfect poets; and yet both of them are liable
to many censures. For there is no uniformity in the design of
Spenser; he aims at the accomplishment of no one action; he raises
up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them
with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal,
without subordination or preference: every one is most valiant in