 Sentiment, not sentimentality, gives value to what is immortal in the "Gerusalemme".It was a new thing in the 16th century, something concordant with a growing feeling for woman and with the ascendant art of music.This sentiment, refined, noble, natural, steeped in melancholy, exquisitely graceful, pathetically touching, breathes throughout the episodes of the "Gerusalemme", finds metrical expression in the languishing cadence of its mellifluous verse, and sustains the ideal life of those seductive heroines whose names were familiar as household words to all Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.