Your great forefathers shall their fame regain,
And Homer’s angry ghost repine in vain[1082].’
In Oxford, at the revival of classical letters, the name of Trojans was assumed by those who were adverse to the new Greek studies, and who, having nothing but a name to rely on, doubtless chose the best they could.
The Imitations by Tasso.
Throughout the ‘Jerusalem’ of Tasso, we find imitations which are invested with greater interest than the remote copies commonly in circulation, because, from the large infusion of many leading arrangements, copied from Homer, into the plot of the poem, we may conclude with reason that they were in all likelihood drawn immediately from the original. Some of these personages, too, are in so far closely imitated from Homer, that Tasso has spent little or nothing of his own upon them, but has simply equipped them with as much of the Homeric idea as he thought available.
The most successful among them is Godfrey, modelled, but also perhaps improved, upon Agamemnon, who is by no means in my view one of the greater characters of the Iliad, though he has been incautiously called by Mitford ‘ambitious, active, brave, generous, and humane[1083].’ Agamemnon has indeed that primary and fundamental qualification for his office, the political spirit, so to term it, and the sense of responsibility, which are so well developed in Godfrey; but it is doubtful whether he is entitled to be called either thoroughly brave, or at all generous or humane. Agamemnon’s character is admirably adapted to its place and purpose in the Iliad; in any more general view, Godfrey’s both stands higher in the moral sphere, and perhaps forms by itself a better poetic whole.
While the action of Achilles in the Iliad is apparently assigned to Rinaldo, there is room to doubt whether Tasso meant the person or character of his hero to carry corresponding marks of resemblance. In what may be called a by-place of his poem, he has made a passing attempt to reproduce both Achilles and Ulysses under the names of Argante and Alete, who appear as envoys from the Sultan of Egypt to the Frankish camp. For the benefit of the former, Tasso has translated the two lines that describe Achilles in Horace, and has added a spice of the Virgilian Mezentius:
Impaziente, inesorabil, fero,
Nell’ arme infaticabil ed invitto,