text:  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