Yet the personal nobility which distinguished him as a thinker and a man, was not of the heroic type.

He had nothing Homeric in his inspiration, nothing of the warrior or the patriot in his nature.
His genius, when it pursued its bias, found instinctive utterance in elegy and idyl, in meditative rhetoric and pastoral melody.

In order to assume the heroic strain, Tasso had recourse to scholarship, and gave himself up blindly to the guidance of Latin poets.

This was consistent with the tendency of the Classical Revival; but since the subject to be dignified by epic style was Christian and mediaeval, a discord between matter and manner amounting almost to insincerity resulted.

Some examples will make the meaning of this criticism more apparent.