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_.