It is in the _Aminta_, in the episodes of the _Gerusalemme_, in a small percentage of the _Rime_, that we find the true Tasso.

For the rest, he had not the advantages enjoyed by Boiardo and Ariosto in a less self-conscious age, of yielding to natural impulse after a full and sympathetic study of classical and mediaeval sources.

The analytical labors of the previous century hampered his creativeness.

He brought to his task preoccupations of divers and self-contradictory pedantries--pedantries of Catholicism, pedantries of scholasticism, pedantries of humanism in its exhausted phase, pedantries of criticism refined and subtilized within a narrow range of problems.

He had, moreover, weighing on his native genius the fears which brooded like feverish exhalations over the evil days in which he lived--fears of Church-censure, fears of despotic princes, fears of the Inquisition, fears of hell, fears of the judgment of academies, fears of social custom and courtly conventionalities.