Trissino with his _Italia Liberata_, Tasso with his _Gerusalemme Liberata_, tried to persuade themselves and the world that they had succeeded in delivering Italy in labor of an epic.

But their maieutic ingenuity was vain.

The nation carried no epic in her womb.
Trissino's _Italia_ was a weazened changeling of erudition, and Tasso's _Gerusalemme_ a florid bastard of romance.

Tassoni, noticing the imposition of these two eminent and worthy writers, determined to give his century an epic or heroic poem in the only form which then was possible.

Briefly, he produced a caricature, modeled upon no existing work of modern art, but corresponding to the lineaments of that Desired of the Nation which pedants had prophesied.