CABINET CYCLOPÆDIA. (continued 3)

At the age of forty-one, after a youth of liberal study, sanguine anticipation, and cherished but ill-directed love for a lady of great beauty and no less celebrity, having been praised by Ariosto—in the unsuccessful pursuit of which he compensated himself and delighted his countrymen with the blandishments of poetry,—he was at length appointed secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno. Him Bernardo accompanied through many strange vicissitudes of prosperity and misfortune, in the court and in the battle-field; till, at the end of a few years, he shared so grievously, yet so magnanimously, in the ruin of his patron, that, the latter being involved in a conspiracy against the vice-regal government of Naples, and compelled to flee into France, the poet followed him thither at the sacrifice of his small estate, and an income which had just raised him above want. Before this ebbing in the tide of his affairs, which, "taken at the flood" (had that not been arrested in its advance), he might reasonably have expected would have led on to fortune, he had married a lady of Naples, named Portia Rossi, an heiress in expectance, and of great personal and mental accomplishments. This was the golden age of Bernardo's life. After the revelry of fancy and romance which had carried him away during his former passion, wherein his heart had little share, the love of affection endeared him to his home, and he felt the transition like one who exclaims, "How sweet is daylight and fresh air!" after the midnight splendour of the ball-room, with the dream-like fascinations of music, dancing, and spectacle, which vanish as effectually as fairy palaces conjured up in the wilderness, and leave the heart desolate.

While Bernardo was at Naples, he commenced a poem of the romantic class on the adventures of Amadis de Gaul, or "Amadigi," as the work is entitled. This he projected upon the regular plan of a fable, having a beginning, middle, and end; but he was not of sufficient authority to establish, by his example, a classical form of epic, though his more successful and more gifted son seems to have borrowed the idea of doing that from him. When he read the first cantos of this performance, as originally constructed, he observed, that though the presence chamber of the court of Salerno was well filled at first with eager and expecting auditors, before he had done nearly all of them had disappeared. From this he concluded (not suspecting any deficiency of power in himself), that the unity of action prescribed by the severer critics was, in its very nature, not agreeable to nature in art, knowing that he had punctiliously observed all the rules of the latter. This failure, enforced by the persuasions of his friends, and the commands of the prince, induced him to remodel what he had written, and elaborate the remainder after the precedents of Pulci, Bojardo, and Ariosto. The work was extended to a hundred cantos, and, when published, was so well received, that the author had cause to congratulate himself on having met the public taste and gratified it; but it was the public taste of the day only, for his poem passed away with the fashion of it, and is now remembered among "things that were," while the three productions of his afore-named predecessors still keep their graduated rank of ascent, and find readers in every age, notwithstanding all the defects and excesses that may be charged upon them. Bernardo's failed; less, perhaps, because of its inferiority, than because it did not display the proportionate superiority which the others had each in turn manifested over all its respective forerunners.

It was while Bernardo resided at Sorrento, a city in the vicinity of Naples, where he occupied a palace overlooking the sea, happy in his home, and prosperous, or rather promising himself prosperity in his fortune, the prince of Salerno having released him from all burdensome duties in his service, that his son Torquato, the second of that name (the first having died young), was born, on the 11th of March, 1544. Sorrento is here put down as the birth-place of the poet, among other cities contending for that honour, like those seven

For of Tasso, in the sequel, a sarcasm as bitter might be recorded. A daughter, elder than either of the boys, was at this time growing up under the eyes of their parents. A letter of the father's (previous to our Torquato's birth) to his sister Afra, who had retired into a convent, gives a lively glimpse of Bernardo's affectionate and domestic character.[37] "My young daughter is very beautiful, and affords me great hopes that she will lead a virtuous and honourable life. My infant son"—Torquato the first—"is before God our Creator, and prays for your salvation. My Portia is seven months gone with child; whether a son or a daughter, it shall be supremely dear to me; only may God, who gives it me, grant that it may be born with his fear; pray together with the holy nuns that the Almighty may preserve the mother, who in this world is my highest joy." It is ludicrous, yet affecting, to observe what little circumstances are eagerly laid hold upon after death, respecting the personal history of men who, during their lives, were neglected in their hardest trials, or oppressed in their helplessness by those who were bound to protect and foster them. The very hour of Tasso's birth, as well as the place, has been contested against his own authority: he says that it was four o'clock in the morning; Serassi, that it was mid-day. "He ought to have been born at Naples," says Manso, "though he happened first to appear at Sorrento." It may be settled that he was a native of Italy rather than of any place where he may first have seen the light, in a country throughout which he was a stranger and a pilgrim all his days. Indeed, he ought to have been born on the sea; so little claim, on the ground of paternal kindness shown to him, had any city in the peninsula to the glory of his birth.

Scarcely had he been welcomed into the world under auspices so cheering as those recently mentioned, than the fortunes of his family took an adverse turn. Bernardo was summoned away from the delightful retirement of Sorrento, to join his patron in the war which had just broken out between the emperor Charles V. and Francis I., and in which the prince brilliantly distinguished himself. Meanwhile, if we are to believe his nursery traditions, the little Torquato was giving, even from his cradle, proofs of the spirit that was in him, scarcely less extraordinary than if, like Hercules, he had strangled serpents, or like another poet of old, attracted bees to his lips, whether to gather or to deposit sweetness there we need not stay to enquire. Manso, his latest and most munificent patron, his first and most encomiastic biographer, (whose memoir, like Boccaccio's of Dante, reads more like romance than reality in many passages, and no where more than in this instance,) says, that the child, even during his first year, gave evidence of the divinity of his genius. For scarcely had he attained his sixth month, when, contrary to the usage of children, he began not only to let loose his tongue (or to prattle a snodar la lingua), but even to speak outright, and that in such a manner that he was never known to lisp (or clip) his syllables, as all other infants do, but formed his words complete, and gave them perfect utterance. If this be true, his marvellous faculty of speech, like the produce of a premature spring, must have suffered an early blight: for he himself records that, in speaking, he was little favoured by nature, having an unconquerable impediment of tongue; whence he preferred to communicate his thoughts rather in writing than by the audible voice, when he meant to win attention or produce impression. His own testimony is so far at variance with the assertion of his friend Manso respecting his early fluency, that he appeals for confirmation of the fact that he is a stammerer (probably to no very inconvenient degree) to some of his correspondents. But we are told, on the same authority, that the infant was equally precocious in the faculties of the mind; that he could reason, explain his thoughts, and answer questions with surprising intelligence. Moreover, to crown the climax, it is said that he seldom cried, and never laughed; the only exception, it may be presumed, of a healthy child since the world began; but that he was grave, dignified, and sage, and announced by his behaviour that he was destined for some great design.

On the return of Bernardo from the army, he enjoyed a brief prolongation of his domestic quiet at Sorrento, during which all that a romantic father and a passionately tender mother could do to awaken, cherish, and confirm the early intimations of transcendent intellect in their darling son, was employed; and such discipline, by its natural effect, no doubt, coloured and characterised their son's mind, in the sequel, to the end of life. In one of Bernardo's letters to Portia, during his late absence, he says, that, while he leaves to her the delicate task to adorn their daughter Cornelia with every virtue and accomplishment which becomes a maiden, he intends himself to train up their young Torquato for his more arduous station in society, when he should be of proper age. This purpose was never realised.

In 1552, the prince of Salerno and his adherents being declared rebels, Bernardo, as one of the most attached of his friends, was included in the proscription: his estate was confiscated, and an income of 900 scudi lost; leaving him utterly destitute of resources, with the exception of a few valuable trinkets, and the hope of some time recovering his wife's dowry—a hope which outlived himself, and which he bequeathed as a perpetual plague of expectation and disappointment to his son, who, as will be seen, obtained a decree to have it, against his mother's brothers, nearly at his own last hour. Bernardo being thus driven into exile, his wife remained with the children at Naples, in very narrow circumstances, though amongst wealthy relatives, who seem always to have treated her and her offspring with unnatural hard-heartedness. Torquato, meanwhile, under her superintendence, was making progress in the general rudiments of knowledge; but especially in the acquisition of languages, in rhetoric, and in poetry, proportioned to the promise of his earlier years. His principal tutor was one Angeluzzo, at a college of the Jesuits, recently established in that city. So eager and intent was he in quest of knowledge (such as lay within his reach), that his mother, so far from having to urge or bribe him onward, was obliged, for his health's sake, to restrain him. Early and late he was at his books; and on the winter's mornings he was sent from his home to the school with a lantern and servant to conduct him. At seven years of age he was already a considerable proficient in the Greek and Latin tongues, and had begun to exercise himself in oral eloquence and written composition; but no genuine specimens of either of these have been preserved.

The following beautiful and touching lines, in which he alludes to the worst period of his life,—his separation from his mother, when called away from Naples to join his father at Rome,—have been absurdly attributed to him as actually penned at this date. Hoole, and even Hunt, two of his modern translators, have fallen into this error; whereas a moment's consideration would convince any man, who understood the difference between adult poetry and puerile attempts at rhyming, that such verses, at such an age, (nine years!) would have been sufficiently remarkable to justify belief in the fables of his babyhood, when he sat talking pretty unbroken Italian on his mother's knee, before he was twelve months old.

The passage occurs in a figurative canzonet on the river Metauso, but addressed to the duke of Urbino, imploring refuge and protection in his adversity. Though left unfinished, the fragment is acknowledged to be one of the most exquisitely wrought of all the author's lyrics:—

These lines—breathing forth such grateful recollections of maternal tenderness, watching, weeping, praying, over a most beloved and affectionate child, from whom she was parting for ever, and who was destined to be far greater than even she, in her fondest entrancement, could have hoped—remind us of our own Cowper's filial reminiscences, in "words that weep," translating "tears that speak," on receiving, at a more distant period of a suffering life, his mother's picture: at sight of which, for a while, he lived over again, with a thousand times more intense delight, the scenes of infancy, renewed, like a vision of pre-existence in some happier state than that which had intervened since he had borne the burthen and heat of a long day of life consumed in anguish of spirit, for which, on this side of the grave, he found no solace, and beyond it, no hope for his bewildered mind; dark as Egypt under the ninth plague in that quarter, though, in every other, light as the land of Goshen. Between Tasso and Cowper there were many traits of sad as well as noble resemblance—kindred genius, a kindred malady, and kindred misfortunes; but not kindred alleviations: the advantage here was on our countryman's side; but his disease lay deeper than that of the former, and the symptoms, if not so violent after the first terrible attack, were more inveterate; so that, contemplating the fate of the glorious Italian under eclipse, and pitying him with a sympathy which no man living but himself could feel, Cowper might have drawn the same comparison between Tasso's case and his own, as he has done in those heart-wringing verses (the last which he is recorded to have composed) under the title of "The Castaway." These were founded upon a circumstance mentioned in Anson's Voyage, of a sailor who fell overboard in a storm, when the ship could not be stayed to rescue him, but who followed in its wake, crying after it, and being heard by his companions, while he

The melancholy poet adds, in reference to himself, that

Both of Tasso's parents had early and deeply impressed upon his mind and his affections veneration and love to God. In his tenth year the Jesuit fathers, following up the religious instructions of this child of promise according to their views of the Gospel, admitted him to the sacrament; on which occasion, though he acknowledges, in one of his epistles, that he could not enter into the mystery of "the real presence," according to the Roman interpretation of the true and simple scripture doctrine of "the communion of the body and the blood of Christ," yet, impressed with awe by the pomp of the spectacle, and elevated almost to transport by sympathy of devotion with the surrounding multitude, he received the symbol, according to his own ingenuous account, with "a certain indescribable and unwonted satisfaction." This circumstance deserves particular mention, because, assuredly, by such a course of domestic and school discipline the boy was trained up in what he understood to be genuine piety, and of which, through after life, he became a zealous professor, however lax on some other subjects his writings, and even his actions, may have been. In the latter respect, however, he was countenanced by the licentious manners of the age, and especially of that class of society, refined and exalted as it was, in which his lot was cast, but in which he was rather entertained as a guest than recognised as a member of the privileged order. His father, in one of his letters to his mother, says, "It is of the utmost importance to impress, with all your influence and authority, upon the infantine mind the name, the love, and the fear of God, that the child may learn to love and honour Him from whom he has received, not life only, but all the benefits and mercies of providence and grace, which can render man happy in this world, and blessed in that which is to come." In the same letter he says, "I condemn those who beat their children, not less than if they should dare to lay hands on the image of God."

It was after the expatriated party to whom Bernardo belonged had planned an attack upon Naples, by the combined fleets of France and Turkey, which miscarried in a miserable piratical descent upon the neighbouring coast, and a disgraceful re-embarkment, that Portia and her daughter were received into a convent, and Torquato was sent to his father at Rome; who, an exile, on a bed of sickness, and in deep poverty, was solacing himself, amidst his misfortunes, with preparing a volume of his Rime for the press, and unweariedly labouring to complete his Amadigi. In "the eternal city," young Tasso prosecuted his studies with indefatigable assiduity, and having for companion a cousin of his own name, Christofero Tasso, a lad of indolent habits and slow capacity. He, by his example and influence, for a while happily stimulated the latter to become a worthy competitor of himself; but he soon growing tired in the course, Torquato left him, and every rival beside, far behind in every learned and liberal accomplishment.

In 1556 Portia died, at Naples, never having seen her husband since his original proscription. Her illness was so brief and so violent, that Bernardo doubted whether it was poison or a broken heart that had cut her off in the prime of her years,—most of which, however, had been so melancholy, since her happiness first seemed consummated by her union with the man of her choice, and in the children of their love, that there needed no auxiliary, in this instance, for Nature to do her work in the shape of death. Meanwhile Bernardo, not being permitted to return to Naples, was compelled, by the stress of hard circumstances, to leave his daughter in the hands of those whom he had but too much reason to call her enemies, though the nearest of kin to her deceased mother. These—probably from motives of rapacity, though political rancour may have added its malignity to the cold venom of avarice—instituted a process against young Torquato, to disinherit him, under a pretence which a fiend incarnate (had such a wanderer from the abyss of lost spirits been permitted to darken the earth with his shadow) might have blushed to advance in a court of justice,—that, having followed his miserable parent to Rome, the boy (at ten years of age!) had made himself partaker of his father's imputed treason, and thereby righteously exposed himself to the same penalties of exile and confiscation. The issue of this iniquitous proceeding does not appear, except it may be gathered from the fact, that the uncles contrived to withhold Torquato's portion of his mother's dowry from him till the last year of his life: and, further to secure the control, at least, of the property by themselves, they married her daughter Cornelia, who, at fifteen years, had grown up into a beauty, to a gentleman of Sorrento, of narrow fortune, but honourable birth, in spite of the protestations of her father, whose ambition had destined her for a higher and more wealthy alliance; his hopes and his plans being even a day's march beyond his power of overtaking them by performance. There is extant a letter written on this occasion by Torquato (probably at the dictation of his father) to Signora Vittoria Colonna, in which the lad bitterly complains against the cruelty of his uncles in forcing this match upon his sister; and implores her interference to prevent the entailment of poverty and disgrace upon the young Cornelia, by such a sacrifice of her person and property to the mercenary views of her relatives. "It is hard," says the reputed writer, "to lose one's fortune; but the degradation of blood is much harder to bear. My poor old father has only us two; and, since fortune has robbed him of his property, and of a wife whom he loved as his own soul, suffer not rapacity to deprive him of his beloved daughter, in whose bosom he hoped to finish tranquilly the few last years of his old age. We have no friends at Naples; our relations are our enemies, and, on account of the circumstances of my father's situation, every one fears to take us by the hand." These stern but tender sentiments, wrung in the agony of heart-sickness from the father, were written, not only by the hand of the son upon the paper of the epistle, but on his own heart, and became identified with his personal feelings through life. Though he never suffered the escutcheon of his family to be blemished by a humbling connection, yet he paid dearly, both in his affections and in his pride, to preserve it; and, if the tradition of his love for a princess of the house of Este be founded in truth, he must have felt that he was himself, in that case, playing the part of "some poor gentleman," whose alliance would be a degradation of the most ancient blood of Italy. Both the father and the son, in the sequel, were reconciled—first for Cornelia's sake, and afterwards for his own—to her husband; who proved a worthy and kind consort, with whom she lived happily, though not long, and by whom she had several children.

In a letter addressed by Bernardo to his daughter, while she was yet a girl, occurs the following affecting day-dreams of the comforts of old age which he hoped to realise in her filial attentions. After exhorting her to mind her lessons, and promising in due time to provide a husband worthy of her, with whom she should live near himself, he thus fondly adverts to that closing scene of a troubled life, to which many a sufferer like him, to the last moment, looked on as a forlorn hope—forlorn, yet inexpressibly soothing, and cherished even in the heart of despair:—"Sweet and tranquil to me will be old age, when I shall see (as I hope it may be the will of God) myself perpetuated in your little ones, with my very features impictured on their countenances. Death will then appear to me less terrible, when, beholding you in honour and in peace, enjoying the love of your husband, and the delights derived from the affections of your children, you shall close with pale hands these eyes of mine. And surely it is due to a dear father to receive the last kisses, the last tears, and every other pious and tender office, from a dutiful and loving daughter."

Fresh commotions in Italy rendering Rome an unsafe sojourn for the homeless Bernardo, he removed his son and his nephew to Bergamo, and fled himself to Ravenna, with two shirts and his Amadigi yet uncompleted; as destitute as his contemporary Camoëns, when he escaped from shipwreck with his Lusiad in one hand, and with the other buffeting the waves—thus saving at once his life and his immortality! On as troubled a sea, by land, as any breadth of water between Lisbon and Canton, not excepting that round the Cape of Storms, Bernardo was tossed to and fro throughout Italy; and continued to the last as poor, yet as sanguine, as the only genius that Portugal had hitherto produced, and proved itself unworthy to give birth to another by its neglect, if not its ingratitude and inhumanity, to that one. But here a gleam of sunshine broke upon Bernardo, amidst the darkness of his flight from Rome. The duke of Urbino invited him to Pesaro, and afforded him a welcome but temporary asylum there from the persecution of his enemies, and the pressure of indigence—a retreat, indeed, which he himself acknowledged was such as might give inspiration to any poet, and where lie, himself, in quiet and amidst that comfort to which he had lately been a stranger, might complete his long poem.

Torquato for a little time was pleasantly situated at Bergamo, in the family of his cousin and fellow-student, where, being a boy of exceedingly prepossessing appearance, amiable disposition, and manifestly brilliant talents, he was much noticed and even caressed by many of the principal persons in the neighbourhood. Bernardo, however, anxious to have him under his own eye and direction, soon reclaimed him. At Pesaro, Torquato, as might be expected, won attention from the whole circle of his father's acquaintance; and the duke d'Urbino himself was so delighted with his graceful modesty and rare accomplishments, that he introduced him to his own son as a suitable companion in his studies and his pleasures. The young noble of fortune at once became attached to the young noble of genius, and a friendship, so natural to kindred minds early associated—the dawn of affection preceding the day-star of passion in the order of Providence—speedily sprang up, and amidst all the splendour of station which through life distinguished the one, and the sufferings by adversity which were the subsequent lot of the other, was never forsworn or forgotten by either. And well was the lustre, so transiently shed by the prince, in the court of his father, upon the humble son of the exile there, imperishably reflected upon himself, in after years, even from the dungeons of Ferrara, by the glory of the author of "Gerusalemme Liberata."

Bernardo having at length put the finishing stroke to his Amadigi, looked to the munificence of the king of France and the prince of Salerno for the means of printing it. In these reliances he was disappointed; and it appears that his patron, the prince, was himself so impoverished, that the pension to the poet of 300 crowns (a poor compensation for all his services and sacrifices) was about this time withdrawn. So utterly perished were Bernardo's resources, in this extremity, that, according to his own lamentable statement, had it not been for the bounty of the duke d'Urbino, he must have been almost reduced to the necessity of begging bread for himself and his son. The duke liberally supplied him, not with bread only for himself and his son, but presented him with 300 ducats, to which were added a hundred gold crowns by the cardinal de Tournon. Hereupon he repaired to Venice, to publish his work. Being received with great respect by the literary characters of that city, then eminent for noble arts as well as victorious arms and prosperous commerce, he was adopted by them, and made secretary to their academy. To this office was annexed a salary so considerable, that, with his wonted improvidence, he immediately established himself in a handsome house, sumptuously furnished, and adorned with what seems to have been his delight, rich tapestry, the poetry of the needle and the shuttle, and which at best is but to painting what painting itself sometimes is to nature — a copy reminding the spectator of an original, of which one of the greatest merits of the imitation is the difficulty overcome in achieving it.

Bernardo's vicissitudes would present a touching but melancholy contrast to those of Gil Blas of Santillane, if written in a style of seriousness and sympathy with what is most sacred in suffering, and trying in hope deferred, equal to the pungent humour and heartless indifference to what is "virtuosest, discreetest, best," in the characteristic adventures of that gay footman of fortune. But such transitions as both Bernardo and Torquato experienced, strange as they seem to us, were events of common occurrence, arising out of the state of society in the petty principalities and commonwealths of Italy in the middle ages, and long after the revival of learning, when those who followed the profession of letters were too often dependent for the means of subsistence upon the precarious patronage of haughty nobles and ostentatious ecclesiastics. The part which Torquato had to bear in the diversities of circumstance, scene, and company, into which he was thrown with his parent, was too well calculated to cherish and confirm all his natural aspirings; while those patrician sentiments, which had been instilled into him from his cradle, amidst poverty, ignominy, and all the wretchedness of ephemeral favour, ever sustained in him a lofty self-esteem, on the ground of honourable birth, the consciousness of innate genius, and the pride of acquired learning, to which had been carefully added those gentlemanly accomplishments which rendered him a fit companion for people of the highest rank in an age of extraordinary display of personal conduct and ceremonial bearing. Tasso, in addition to his peculiar advantages, excelled in all these conventional ones, except in self-control—that especially which degenerates into servility—for (though the most exquisite flatterer in the world, as thousands of panegyrical verses prove him to have been) he never learned the meaner, but more profitable, art of being a court-minion.

While he was thus pursuing his studies with in defatigable application, he was not less diligent in cultivating those talents, which had given such extraordinary signs of power within him. It is stated that while, for the latter purpose, he was reading with intense devotion the poets both of old Italy and new, as well as the relics of the nobler bards of ancient Greece, like most of his countrymen, (perhaps, from secret nationality of feeling,) he preferred the Latins to these, and among the Latins Virgil beyond every other bore the palm in his youthful imagination. In fact he grew so enamoured of the graces and excellences of the Æneid, that his own epic became just such a work as, it might be presumed, Virgil himself would have composed in the same age, and under the same influences, as Tasso lived; while, on the other hand, had their births been exchanged, Tasso might have been the glory of the court of Augustus, and flourished then in splendour amidst the greatest and most intellectual society of men of talents that were ever contemporary, instead of being an almoner, an exile, a prisoner, beholden for food and raiment, in his best estate, to the bounty—or rather to the parsimony—of "the Great Vulgar" of Italy in the sixteenth century, whose names are more illustrious from having been connected with his, than for any record of themselves or their ancestors, which could render their families illustrious beyond the little boundaries of their domains. This supposition, in reference to Virgil and Tasso, may be deemed impertinent; hazardous it certainly is, and once would have been deemed heretical by the idolaters of the Roman poet. Though this is not precisely the place, yet, in a discursive memoir like the present, it may be allowable, to remark upon a line of Boileau, which has done more injury to the reputation of Tasso than all the splenetic criticisms of Sperone, and the verbal persecutions of the Della Cruscans. Ridiculing the bad taste of certain personages who haunt courts, and from their rank and assurance are permitted to judge as foolishly as they please of the merits of authors with impunity, he says (and in a note gives a special instance of such aristocratic wrong-headness[38]) that these will prefer "à Malherbe, Théophile," "Théophile to Malherbe,"—

This flippant antithesis, which, from its sparkling ambiguity, might itself be quoted as a specimen of sheer "tinsel" (clinquant), amounts to no more than that there are "fools," as the satirist calls them, who prefer what is false in Tasso to what is true in Virgil; but that the whole, the half, or even a tenth of the "Gerusalemme Liberata," of which he himself speaks elsewhere with sufficient commendation, is composed of "clinquant," without a greatly overbalancing weight of gold even in its worst parts, he has not dared to affirm, though by a pitiful insinuation, not less unworthy of the author than unjust to the object, he has had the left-handed luck to fix a stigma to that effect upon the fair fame of one, in comparison with whose magnificent creations of thought his own finely elaborated productions are but as "French wire" to "solid bullion." The feeble confirmation of Boileau's equivocal sentence, by the elegant but prejudiced Addison, is of little weight. The critic, who, in tracing Milton's obligations to some of his great forerunners, acknowledges that among these he might have included Tasso, but that he does not deem him "a sufficient voucher," could be but very imperfectly acquainted with the authority which he affected to disparage, but which the poet of "Paradise Lost" held in very different estimation. Try Boileau, when he attempts a strain of heroics, as in the "Ode on the taking of Namur," or Addison, in his celebrated "Campaign," by any page that may be first opened in all Tasso's multifarious compositions in verse, and the "white plume" on the crest of Louis XIV., which the court poet mistook for a star, and the destroying "angel," which the court critics of queen Anne's reign hailed as descending from "the highest heaven of invention," and the feather metamorphosis, in the first instance, will be pronounced a puerile and pedantic conceit; and the "angel," in the second, a piece of commonplace machinery, which scarcely escapes the charge of profaneness in its main attribute. Marlborough, a mortal man, burning to avenge his country's wrongs, may well be imagined as slaughtering, with terrible delight, the thousands and tens of thousands of her enemies; but that an angel should be "pleased" (as the cold and heartless phrase is) in executing judgments upon unresisting victims of divine wrath (righteous as the vengeance may be) is utterly inconceivable; nor can the poet shelter himself under the doubtful interpretation of the context,—

because the first, last, and only impression upon the reader's mind will be, that the destroyer is "pleased" with the destruction, though the Almighty himself declares that "He hath no pleasure in the death of the wicked." Both these passages might have escaped carping criticism; but, when Boileau and Addison mislead the public to believe that Tasso's writings are "all tinsel," it is fair to show that their own are not "all gold."[39]

Torquato's mind now feeling strength, and gaining confidence to undertake things beyond his years, he diligently gave his days and nights, in the intervals of severer exercises, to reading and meditating upon the works of his great Italian predecessors, that he might form, after their models, a style of verse and manner of composition which should rival theirs, and yet be all his own. Unconsciously, it is probable, at first, but gradually as he grew up, through an undefined period, he conceived, and, before he reached the age of eighteen, had executed, what Dr. Black calls "the most wonderful work that ever was written by man," when the youth of the author, and the short time in which it was composed—ten months, it is reported—are taken into the account. The "Joan of Arc," by our illustrious countryman, Southey, produced in a less compass of time, and at an age not much more advanced than Tasso's, may fairly be put in competition with the "Rinaldo," without disparagement to either. Nothing connected with the existence of man, in this mysterious world, at once living within and beyond himself, exceeds, either in purity or intensity, the delight of youth when framing poetry at first according to the extent of new-formed powers, and anticipating poetry to come, when years shall have matured his faculties, and his wings, after their first moulting, shall have acquired full vigour of plume to bear him "with no middle flight" above the Aonian mounts while he pursues

Among real "curiosities of literature" there yet remain copies of Dante and Petrarch, with marginal notes in Torquato's handwriting, which prove with what microscopic minuteness he examined and studied the productions of those masters of that language, to which he himself was destined to give consummate grace as well as power of expression—the strength of Dante, modified from the muscular proportions of Hercules to those of the fine-limbed Apollo,—the delicacy of Petrarch veiled, like the Medicean Venus, in the mantle of Minerva. It may here be noticed, that Tasso was no more an expert penman than a fluent speaker; his manuscripts, according to his own acknowledgment, being very indifferently recommended either by the fashion of the letters, or the correctness of the spelling. The numberless erasures, interpolations, and new readings, with which many of his best works, preserved in the library of the house of Este, are disfigured to the eye, are interesting marks of that process of elaboration by which he slowly but as effectually brought out all the hidden beauty of his thoughts, as though they had been suddenly conceived and perfectly expressed in the ardour of inspiration.

During their residence at Venice, Torquato was much employed by his father in transcribing his own multitudinous poems and letters, as well as in preparing for the press the enormous length of the "Amadigi." By this exercise the son himself became daily more familiarised with the means and artifices by which those who excel others in the productions of their genius, form their peculiar style according to their peculiar standard of intellect, and identify their whole cast of thinking with their whole structure of language. To put a passage of an eloquent author to the nicest test of touch (if the expression may be allowed for the intercourse of mind with mind, in the communication and reception of ideas splendidly conceived and felicitously bodied forth by the one, and by degrees only apprehended by the other,)—to put to the nicest test of touch, as it were, any eloquent passage of poet or orator, let the admirer copy it out at length, and he will find that the progress of mind, hand, and eye, going all together, and through every part, will give him the most distinct possible possession of the whole in its full proportion, minutest details, and utmost effect.

But while thus the amanuensis of his father, Torquato was not less assiduously cultivating his own talents, and meditating the composition already alluded to, in which he was soon not only to rival the former, but even while a boy, and upon the enchanted ground of romance itself, to prove a greater magician than he. This the sudden and passionate admiration with which his "Rinaldo" was hailed throughout Italy, and beyond the Alps and Pyrenees, irreversibly established. The failure of Bernardo's hopes, in the neglect with which both sovereign princes and the reading public, after the first effervescence of applause, treated his "Amadigi," was nearly contemporaneous with the first triumph of his more fortunate son, who, so far as fame could gratify or reward his literary labours, may be said to have succeeded in all that he attempted, either in prose and verse, thenceforward, though some of his performances had but an ephemeral popularity, being welcomed at first, and afterwards formally honoured from the courtesy due to their author, and the measure of kindred excellence by which they were all allied to the happier offspring of his too prolific mind. Bernardo, after he found that the stupendous monument of labour in vain, which he had spent so many years in accumulating, was likely to be left to moulder away and fall of itself into oblivion,—having at its first appearance excited neither enough of envy or admiration to render it extensively attractive to public curiosity,—lay down in despondency at its base, amidst his perished hopes; and though he made several attempts afterwards to rise, these were all equally unavailing, and the latest solace of his life was the contemplation of that glory descending upon his son which had departed from him.

In considering the fate, by a natural death (so to express it), after a date somewhat longer than that of a natural life, of those who have been renowned in their own age, but have dwindled into insignificance, or become utterly extinct in that which followed, it may be said of the far greater number of those who flourish among contemporaries, not, indeed, that they,

but that they are flowers which bloom in their season, and charm with their fragrance the passers by of one generation, then disappear, and are remembered no more. This is the order of Providence, and it is wise and good; for were the Almighty less liberal of his gifts, though the possessors being "few and far between" might be more admired and longer, the world would be less benefited than by that perpetual succession and supply (according to the demand for literature) of minds worthy, perhaps, of any age, but formed peculiarly to suit the taste, the manners, and the society of their own. Among Chalmers' "English Poets," for example, how many names, once illustrious, now merely catalogued, are prefixed to works, unread though unforgotten, on which talents as diversified and as well cultivated as the circumstances of the times would allow were painfully expended, to delight and improve mankind; each of whose possessors hoped, besides serving his own generation, to leave something behind which the world would not willingly let die. Yet it may be questioned whether some of these, had they lived in other periods, or under different orders of things, might not have taken far higher rank among the candidates for fame, and established permanent claims to the veneration of posterity. Is not great genius, as we call it, when fortunately developed, and favoured by many contingencies, without which it never would have been so developed, more common than is generally imagined? Is there not at all times and every where a class of intelligences which may be trained up to become generals and captains in literature, in comparison with the rank and file out of which they may be called by peculiar events in their own or their nation's history, and without which they could not have risen above the ordinary state of their less distinguished, but, perhaps, equally capable companions; as the working bees in a hive, as some naturalists tell us, when their queen is lost or taken away from the little community, by a particular regimen, may be nourished up into queens, and from labourers become perpetuators of the race? There seems some probability for this hypothesis, fanciful as it may be deemed, because in all extraordinary emergencies, whether in the world of politics or of literature, minds of the first order are invariably brought into activity from the motives, the means, and the opportunities then afforded to them, though they could never have risen above the depression, mediocrity, or neutral indifference to which they were born, in which they had long lived, and must assuredly have died, had it not been for those apparently accidental opportunities which gave them distinction and pre-eminence, by a change in themselves resembling a new creation, but in reality only an awakening of latent powers.

While Torquato was thus continually giving new pledges, and redeeming old ones of equal lustre, or surpassing the proudest names in his country's literature, the old man, from bitter but unprofitable experience as regarded himself, having proved the precariousness of the favour of princes, and the vanity of expecting fortune to follow fame in verse, determined to indemnify his son for the loss of both his parents' property by bringing him up to a profession in which wealth and honour might more readily be acquired by common industry than by idly looking for the golden rewards of genius at the hands either of aristocratic patrons, who bestow them as bounties, or of the multitude that compose the public, and who care little about the good or ill fare of those on whom their transient applauses are lavished.

In his seventeenth year, therefore, Bernardo placed his son at Padua, to study jurisprudence, as Petrarch and Ariosto had been condemned to do before him, by prudent parents, and like each of those hopeful sons, who were

Torquato (though it is said that he dutifully and diligently applied with his head to the study of the law) gave his heart and his hand in secret to the unportioned muse. The issue of this affiance, while he was yet embroiled in the nets of legal precedents and practice, was the "Rinaldo" already mentioned, a romantic poem, in twelve cantos. The hero is not his own champion of that name, the glory of his later poems, but one of "the million" that figure in the "Orlando Furioso"—a work which so possessed the mind of young Tasso, while he was at Venice, that he tells us he could not sleep for the fame of Ariosto. This juvenile performance is written more after the manner of that inimitable master than the "Gerusalemme;" but, though deficient in the humour and vivacity which constitute the all-binding and assimilating spell of Ariosto's tissue of episodes, and by which the reader is reconciled to wink at all the author's incongruities and caprices, Tasso's poem, nevertheless, by a more serious kind of magic, laid hold upon public feeling and so happily hit the expiring taste of his countrymen for the extravagances of chivalrous fiction, that where his father, after years of hard toil in the same fields had miscarried, the son, in ten months, achieved a triumph, of which the trophies remain to this day; "Rinaldo" being yet one of the metrical romances which are interwoven with the party coloured staple of Italian literature.

Well might Bernardo be astonished and delighted, yet humbled and chagrined (in some measure), when the manuscript of his son's poem was presented to him, seeing himself already eclipsed in his meridian altitude (which he fondly imagined he had attained in the "Amadigi") by this morning-star of promise just "flaming in the forehead of the orient sky;" and perceiving, as he must have done, that his purpose was for ever thwarted, of placing the boy in that path where fortune scatters her golden apples before the feet of competitors in the race for her favour, rather than indulging them with golden dreams under the shadows of laurels planted by the wayside, the most precious rewards which she bestows on the most successful among poets. The father, however, was too great a lover of song to ruin a good poet in making a bad lawyer, as might have been the case had he persevered in his former views with his son. Wherefore, after some delay, he reluctantly, yet willingly, (a state of mind perfectly possible, though hard to reconcile,) gave his consent to the publication of the "Rinaldo." He who in the letter to his daughter formerly quoted, so tenderly and beautifully anticipated the happiness of being himself, with his very features, perpetuated in her infant progeny, could not but be transported to see himself, with the features of his very soul, perpetuated in the glorious offspring of his son's congenial yet surpassing mind. With a smile and a sigh, therefore, he permitted the poem to appear, surrendering at the same time his cherished expectation of seeing that son as eminent in the law as he was now likely to be in that which is remotest from law practice and law profits. "Let who will make the laws," said Fletcher of Saltoun, "let me make the songs of a people, and by these I will govern them." Tasso's songs have assuredly had larger dominion, and had deeper, wider, more enduring influence in modifying the subsequent character of his countrymen than any legislative enactments, in which it may be imagined that he would never have been concerned, could have exercised. But then he might have enriched and ennobled himself; he might have escaped most of the calamities which hunted him to death in the midst of life; and he might not only have been happier himself, but a more useful member of that society in which he was born, which he served in his day, and in which he died without any monument except some splendid sculpture to record his name. It came otherwise to pass; and whether the world has been made better or worse by his labours, it must be acknowledged that the fame which he sought, and for which he sacrificed all beside, was dearly purchased to himself by the sufferings which it cost him to win. It is reported that when Bernardo remonstrated with him on his indiscreet preference of philosophy (for with him philosophy and poetry were identified) to jurisprudence, and angrily demanded, "What has your philosophy done for you?" he replied, "It has taught me to bear with meekness the reproofs of a father."

The appearance of Torquato's "Rinaldo" was not only the dawn of his own day of glory, but the dawn of a new day in the literature of his country. The age of absolute romance was succeeded by one of transition in public taste, during which what was most truly wonderful and meritoriously captivating in the wild fictions of knight-errantry was engrafted upon a stock of classical invention, design, and execution. This was in fact the nearest recurrence that could be made in epic poetry to the models of the ancients,—for the mythological machinery of Greece and Rome could not again be revived in poetry any more than in religion; Jupiter could never again resume his thunder and his throne; Neptune his trident; Pallas her ægis, or Venus her cestus; nor could the supernatural interposition of the supreme God, the agency of angels and sainted spirits, or of Saturn and his legions, be extensively employed (without constructive irreverence, not to say rank blasphemy) as auxiliaries in heroic fable, disguised as true history, or true history disguised as heroic fable. Tasso, Marino, Camoëns, and Milton have indeed presumed upon the perilous experiment of enlisting the armies of heaven and hell in conflict with each other, and intermeddling with earthly affairs; yet, with the exception of our countryman—and he would be a bold critic who should dare to arraign him for impiety in the use of what nothing but the most signal, unexampled, and inimitable felicity of success could justify,—it may be added, that he would be a critic not less bold, who, as a believer in the Christian faith, should venture to defend even Milton to the extent in which he has exercised this questionable, though hitherto unlitigated, license of fiction;—with the exception of our countryman, the authors aforenamed have, for the most part, grievously miscarried in the management of their agents of this class, whether good or evil, these being among the most indifferent and ineffective personages in their respective poems. Epic poetry, indeed, either upon classic or romantic precedent, may be said to have become extinct from the time of Tasso. "Paradise Lost" cannot be classed with either; he having achieved the only work of the kind, which, being neither the one nor the other, but combining the merits of each, touched the point beyond which improvement could not be carried. He may be said to have lived in the last age in which supernatural agents and miraculous interventions could be successfully introduced into narrative verse, as being consistent with popular credulity or superstitious belief—an absolutely indispensable requisite for the employment of such means to illustrate human affairs. For example, a poem equal to Homers or Ariosto's, written now on the plan, and with the gods of the one or the enchantments of the other, would be insufferable: no power of genius could create an interest in behalf of Apollo and Venus, no longer believed in by the poet or by his readers; nor would the achievements of giants and witches, if celebrated by one born in this "age of reason," find mercy from criticism, or indulgence even from the vulgar students of our penny literature. Monk Lewis's Tales of Wonder, and the monstrosities of the German drama, have been long ago forgotten; the "Michael Scott" of the great minstrel "of that ilk!" alone keeps his ground; but all the other preternatural machines of the same creative hand would have perished utterly, had they not been associated with records of the doings and sufferings of beings of flesh and blood like ourselves, though existing in a state of semi-barbarous society exceedingly different from our own.

The "Rinaldo" was the first form of the abstract conception of a regular poem, at once to rival Virgil and Ariosto, which originated in the mind of Torquato while yet a youth of seventeen, but was not wholly developed till, at twice that age, he had produced the "Gerusalemme Liberata." All the characteristics of his peculiar genius are perceptible in the incidents, style, embellishments, and conduct of this juvenile essay; which, contrasted with the matured form and perfect majesty of that later offspring of his genius, is, as his own Gabriel, sent to comfort Godfrey, at the opening of the siege of Jerusalem:—take the image in Fairfax's version,—

compared with Milton's "Raphael," "in prime of manhood, where youth ended," alighting on the eastern cliff of Paradise, where,—

This prodigy of youthful genius no sooner appeared than it was hailed with acclamation throughout Italy, and eager inquiries from every quarter were made concerning the author—that prodigality of praise might be lavished upon him by the learned, and parsimony of recompence, doled out to him by princes, ambitious of attaching so great a "natural curiosity" to the collection of live rarities about their palaces. For the great of those times coveted the glory, little as they liked the expense, of retaining men of talents in the train of their sycophants and dependents, even when they regarded them only as remarkable among their species, in the same manner as the lions, tigers, eagles, peacocks, and other strange and beautiful animals in their menageries were in comparison with the meaner ranks of brutes. Ariosto, who had experienced all the bitterness of such favour, and felt keenly the ignominy of such distinction, plainly tells us, that the patrons of his day loved those of their parasites who would minister to their personal necessities, pull off and on their boots, share in their orgies, and pander to their vices,—rather than those, whose proud stomachs disdained to allow them to be any thing less than themselves within the precincts of courts,—poets among princes, who could give enduring lustre to the names of inglorious patrons, which otherwise would have found no better memorial than the registers of their births, marriages, and deaths in their family genealogies.

After Torquato's emancipation from the trammels of law by the hand of the parent who had so carefully involved him in them,—flushed with the new wine of liberty, obtained at the surrender of every thing else in prospect, and with nothing but itself in possession,—he repaired to Bologna, to pursue his philosophical studies and indulge in his poetical passion;—for poetry was truly to him a passion, and the ruling one of his existence,—honour, fortune, ease, pleasure, were all in turns but ministers to this, while by this he aimed at the acquisition of each of them, as the one or the other were, for the moment, the object of desire or the subject of lamentation for having lost it. But from Bologna he was expelled for a literary squib, the only thing of the kind by which he has gained any celebrity, whether it were his own or not. Some anonymous censor had been amusing himself with publishing pasquinades, ridiculing the principal people of the city, as well as the students of the college, with "much malice and a little wit." Those who were exposed to these sarcasms were exceedingly galled by the firing from this ambuscade of the pen, and the more so as they knew not on whom to wreak their vengeance. Torquato, in the reckless gaiety of a youth of twenty, on a certain occasion making himself merry among his companions by repeating one of these, was immediately pounced upon as the author, not only of the unlucky lines, with which he had been caught in his mouth, but he was assailed as being the secret manufacturer of all the rest. It was in vain that he denied the charge indignantly, and challenged his accusers for the proofs, urging that he himself had been the butt of the sharp-shooter's shafts, flying out of darkness and hitting in broad day. His papers were seized and examined before the criminal magistrate; but nothing being discovered to fix the imputation upon him, he was nominally acquitted, though the suspicion was not so easily effaced from the minds of the offended individuals. He took the matter himself in such dudgeon, that he precipitately left Bologna, and removed to Padua, whither he had been Invited by his early friend Scipio Gonzaga, who had lately established in the latter city the academy Degli Eterei, of which Tasso—certainly one of the most congenial spirits of the age—was worthily enrolled a member, and, according to the pedantic fashion of those pompous but puerile institutions, assumed the name of Pentito—for some fanciful reason not well explained, though there has been no small wrangling about it.

To enlarge his mind, to exalt his imagination, and to enrich his eloquence, Torquato now devoted much of his attention to the works of Aristotle and Plato; but while the former subjected his reason to the severest discipline in the ascertainment of principles of truth, he gave his whole soul to the guidance of the latter, whose visionary splendour and profound speculations, on subjects the highest that created intelligences can conceive, and of which comparatively so little can be learned without "light from heaven" to illumine the "light of nature,"—while infinite space is afforded for everlasting conjectures, showing at once the capabilities and the limitations of the human intellect,—these peculiarly suited the young student's cast of thought and intense delight in contemplating the things that are invisible and eternal, as associated with things seen and perishable. Nor was the philosophical poet an unworthy disciple of the poetical philosopher, even upon his own ground and in his own style. Many of Tasso's sublimest compositions are in the form of dialogues, in which he discourses with an elevation of sentiment and a power of diction which might have gained admiration in the school of his master himself.

Meanwhile the germ of his great poem, which had been quickened, probably not later than the publication of the "Rinaldo," was growing up in his thought,—for Tasso, by the necessity of his nature, was ever ruminating on some premeditated or progressive theme; and some mightier conception followed the disburdenment of every matured production of his inexhaustibly inventive genius. While this new and magnificent project was gradually assuming shape and character before he entered upon the deliberate execution of it, he prepared himself for the task by composing his "Discourses on Heroic Poetry," which place him among critics in as high a rank as that which he holds among poets. The merit of these essays, indeed, is so remarkable, that his principal English biographer, Mr. Black, is almost seduced by them to assert the universality of the author's genius, in the following plausible remark and happy quotations from high authority concerning another extraordinary poetic genius, which seemed capable of excelling in whatever it undertook, whether in prose or rhyme:—"Of the 'Discourses on Heroic Poetry' there appear to have been four, only three of which have been printed. Though composed at the age of twenty, and published without the knowledge and corrections of the author, they are exceedingly valuable; and while they display a most refined taste, discover also much metaphysical acuteness and geometrical precision. Indeed, I am more and more of opinion that what Mr. Stewart says of Burns is true in general of every great poetical genius, 'All the faculties of Burns's mind,' says he, 'were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition.'"

In this year, 1564, Torquato visited his venerable father, now literally "dagl' anni e da fortuna oppresso," "borne down by years and evil fortune." The transport of affection with which two of the greatest men of their age, in the most seductive walk of human ambition, met at Mantua, in the relationship of parent and offspring, must have been chastened, yet rendered more exquisitely endearing, when the father, from his own sad experience, must have foreseen, by "his prophetic soul," the sorrows to come which his son would encounter in the course that he had chosen; while the son, with emotions not less painful, must have looked upon his father, remembering the sorrows past, which he had endured in the vain pursuit of fame from the multitude, and fortune from patrons, in whose cause he had sacrificed two sources of competence—his own small patrimony, and his wife's dowry.

During this visit the youth was attacked by a dangerous illness, from which being rescued by the skill of a physician named Coppino, the grateful father rewarded the doctor with the fee of a stanza to his honour in a new poem, entitled "Floridante," which the aged minstrel, whom no medicine could cure of the disease of rhyme, was composing in his seventy-third year. This daughter, as she might be called, of his "Amadigi," to which it is a sequel, and his own last child of imagination, proved as short-lived as its romantic, and almost as its natural, parent, though the dutiful Torquato endeavoured himself to revive it, in his own dark days; but "Floridante," of whom it could not be said that "she had no poet," died though she had two, and those of no mean name. Bernardo Tasso himself survived for five years, dying in 1669, at the age of seventy-six. However undervalued by posterity, he was unquestionably the greatest poet who had appeared between Ariosto and his son Torquato.

About this time Torquato received an intimation that the cardinal d'Este, brother to the duke of Ferrara, had nominated him one of his personal attendants, and expected him forthwith in that city. Notwithstanding the warnings of his father's old friend, Sperone, and afterwards his own, Zoilus, who, exasperated by the disappointment of hopes of preferment which he had cherished when he went to Rome, gave loose to the most violent invectives against courts and courtiers, and earnestly dissuaded Torquato from trusting himself where nothing but allurements to ruin would be placed in his way, from which it was hardly possible for virtue to escape unscathed or uncorrupted, the young poet, however, determined not to profit by the experience of the old one, but to learn for himself what experience alone can teach, and what he indeed learned at an awful cost in the issue. He resolutely, therefore, determined to put both his virtue and his fortune to the hazard of temptation, not doubting that he could secure the former and advance the latter, where the most illustrious court in Italy was held by a descendant of the patron of Ariosto. Accordingly he hastened to Ferrara, anticipating every thing that never came to pass, except the one thing on which, indeed, his mind was most bent, that there he should complete his contemplated epic, and establish a name which should associate him with the most renowned of his predecessors. What a bright morning was that, forerunning a day of darkness and despair, on which he entered the city, happily unsuspecting the troubles that awaited him there! The kings of England, of the house of Hanover, are lineally descended from the family of Este. These much celebrated princes, in the best period of their ascendency, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were the magnificent, if not the liberal, patrons of most of the men of genius in the finer arts who were contemporary with them; and none was more so than the reigning duke, Alfonso II., under whose benign influence for a while, but under whose blighting displeasure afterwards, poor Tasso flourished and faded.

On the last day of October, 1565, Torquato arrived at Ferrara, where the most superb preparations were making for the nuptials of Alfonso with Barbara, daughter of the emperor Ferdinand, and sister to Maximilian II. He was cordially welcomed, and immediately received into the service of the duke's brother, cardinal Luigi, whose establishment consisted of nearly 800 persons, ministering to his pleasure or subsisting on his bounty. This prince was not less dignified than his brother, but altogether more amiable and engaging. On the 2d of December the queen (as she was styled from her imperial lineage) entered Ferrara, crowned, and accompanied by a gorgeous retinue. The marriage was celebrated by a succession of the most imposing spectacles and profuse festivities, which continued for six days, when they were suddenly broken off on the arrival of intelligence of the death of the pope, Pius IV. Among the throng of the great and the small, who had assembled from all parts of Italy to witness the tournaments, the pantomimes, the balls, and the banquets given on this occasion, Torquato was but a solitary unit; observing and treasuring up in his memory all that he saw and heard, as materials for celebration in another form of the same scenes of luxury and splendour upon a grander scale, and, though in an ideal field, of more enduring exhibition. Myriads of eyes may have glanced upon the contemplative youth, and passed over him as one of the most insignificant personages in the city; but, after the lapse of nearly three centuries, even these gorgeous ceremonials are principally subjects of interest because he was present at them. Not a human being in existence at this remote period (one might imagine) can feel any personal sympathy with the bridegroom, the bride, or any other actor or spectator, native or stranger, upon the spot; yet even "the representation of the Temple of Love, which was erected in the ducal gardens, with a stupendous scenery of porticoes and palaces, of woods and mountains," is worthy of being remembered, because of the far-surpassing glory of imaginative palaces and gardens which were suggested to the admiring poet by the tawdry pageant, "which lasted six hours without appearing tedious to the spectators," as Muratori states; though, according to the pithy remark of Gibbon, the latter is "the most incredible circumstance" connected with the whole account.

During the four months which intervened between the demise of Pius IV. and the election of a new pope, who assumed the name of Pius V., Torquato's patron, the cardinal Luigi, being absent, he was left at Ferrara to make his way into favour wherever an opening might be presented; and it was then that he became more particularly acquainted with the princesses Lucretia and Leonora of Este, by whom he was brought under the notice of their brother the duke, who, after all that has been said and conjectured, seems never to have regarded him otherwise than with stately or selfish condescension. That a youth so gifted with genius, so early distinguished among his countrymen, favoured by nature with more than ordinary personal advantages, and in many other ways gallantly accomplished, should have attracted the esteem of these illustrious ladies, who appear to have been more than mere court beauties, both in intellect and sensibility, delighting in poetry, and occasionally exercising themselves in it, was almost a necessary consequence of the parties becoming acquainted. Under such circumstances, nothing could be more natural than that, on either side, secret presentiments of the most gratifying kind should unconsciously spring up and be covertly cherished by the several individuals; never, indeed, as must be inferred from the sequel, to be fully disclosed, nor even, perhaps, perfectly understood by themselves. If, in the age of chivalry, it was imperative upon true knights to assert the beauty and maintain the honour of their ladies in all due seasons, and in all proper places, it was, in the seventeenth century, equally the duty of true poets to celebrate the same virtues and adornments in their verses upon those of the better sex, who were either their mistresses or their patronesses. Torquato, dazzled by the transition from schools, law offices, and colleges of philosophy, to the court region of enchantment, has described his own emotions and the influence of the change upon him in the language which he puts into the mouth of Tirsi (the representative of himself in his "Amintor"), where, after taking vengeance on his father's friend, but his own very questionable one (Sperone), for having dissuaded him from going to the city, which, he assured him, was given up wholly to deceit, voluptuousness, avarice, and ambition, the shepherd tells his companions how bravely he was disabused when he beheld the marvellous reality; for there, "as gracious heaven would have it, I happened to pass near the blissful dwelling, whence issued sweet, harmonious voices of swans, of nymphs, of syrens—heavenly syrens! and sounds of music soft and clear, with other ravishments so strange, that for a while I stood entranced with joy and admiration." Being courteously invited to enter by one of noble aspect, who appeared the guardian of the enchanted spot, he exclaims, "O then what saw, what felt I? I beheld nymphs, goddesses, and minstrels—luminaries new and beautiful—all without veil or cloud, as to the immortals, scattering silver dews and golden rays, Aurora seems; Apollo and the Muses, too, I saw, and in that moment felt myself as growing greater. Filled with new virtue, new divinity, I sang of wars and heroes, disdaining my rude pastoral pipe. But though I soon returned to these calm shades (to please another), I still retained a portion of that nobler spirit; my simple reed no longer warbled as before, but, rivalling the trumpet, filled the woods with notes more lofty and sonorous. Mopso (Sperone) heard it, and, with evil eye, looked on me and bewitched me, so that I grew hoarse, and long continued mute. The shepherds thought I had been glared at by a wolf—a wolf, indeed, he was to me!" The last allusion is to Sperone's savage criticisms on the "Gerusalemme," when submitted to his examination in manuscript. Torquato, however, had reason to think, after years of disappointing experience, that Sperone's notions of courts and courtiers were quite as near the truth as his own, during his first visit and sojourn at Ferrara.

Of the duke, his brother the cardinal, and their three sisters, it is recorded that thirteen years before this date, on a public occasion, in presence of their father, Hercules II., and pope Paul III., the "Adelphi" of Terence, in the original, was recited by them with great spirit and effect, the parts being sustained by the princesses Anna, aged twelve, Lucretia, eight, Leonora, six, the princes Alfonso, ten, and Luigi, five years of age. Mr. Black observes, with apparent justice, that the court of Alfonso united, "like the poems of Tasso, classic elegance with the richness of romance; and every thing conspired to kindle the fancy and refine the taste of the youthful bard."

Anna, the eldest of the three sisters above named, in 1548 was married to the celebrated Francis, duke of Guise, and, after his decease, to James of Savoy, duke of Nemours. Lucretia, some years later than Tasso's arrival at her brother's court, was married to the prince of Urbino, only fifteen years old, when she herself was thirty-seven. This was one of those state alliances which so little resemble treaties of peace, that they deserve to be branded as treaties of discord, in which royal and noble parents sacrifice their children, if not to Moloch, at least to Mammon—nay, too often to both,—for purposes of family aggrandisement, by adding territory to territory, and confounding blood with blood. On the occasion of these unhappy nuptials, Tasso, "as in duty bound," wrote an epithalamium, which had, in its predictions of felicity, the equivocal qualification for excelling in that kind of poetry which Waller, with experienced adroitness, hinted to Charles II., when rallied by his majesty on having composed a far finer panegyric on Cromwell than on himself—the qualification of fiction; for scarcely had the ill-paired couple had time to fall out, when the gallant prince left his bride to volunteer in a crusade against the Turks, with whom everlasting warfare, in every petty form of hostility, was wont to be carried on by the states of Italy. The union ultimately was dissolved, without the intervention of death; and Lucretia, as duchess of Urbino, returned to Ferrara. For many years afterwards, she was, more openly than either her brother or her younger sister, the patron of Tasso, and to her are some of his most graceful lyrics addressed.

Leonora, the third and younger sister, remained unmarried. Being highly attractive in person, in manner, and in mind, it is no wonder if Torquato, having many opportunities of ingratiating himself in her favour, should be gradually betrayed, under the guise of that romantic strain of adulation to rank and beauty (especially in verse) which the fashion of the times not only tolerated but sanctioned, to insinuate all the fervour of a passion which, though hardly aware of it himself, and altogether unacknowledged by its sensitive object, might yet be harboured in the bosoms of both, though so secretly, that each more complacently and jealously watched the symptoms of a tender attachment in the other, than cared to examine the reality of the same in themselves. The mystery, thus cherished, for the tantalising delight of a hope too remote to be fulfilled, except at the sacrifice of every thing but that love, for which, if true, nothing might be deemed too much to be sacrificed, has never been cleared up, and all reasoning and conjecture on the subject, at this distance of time, must be vain. It has been with equal confidence both affirmed and denied, that the poet imprudently aspired to the hand of the princess, and that the princess as imprudently surrendered her heart to the poet, though, from necessity, she withheld her hand. From the numberless canzoni and sonetti, of which love is the theme, among the rime of Tasso, no premises towards the solution of this problem can be drawn. Dante and Petrarch, in all their effusions of the kind, are constant each to his respective mistress. Beatrice and Laura are the perpetual idols of their amorous devotion; but to so many—or, if to one, under so many different names and characters,—are Tasso's adorations addressed, that he may have had fifty fits of passion for as many flames, and been as true in turn to each and equally volatile to all. It is, however, a remarkable circumstance, that three of the greatest poets of Italy should owe as much of their posthumous renown to their questionable love as to their acknowledged genius, having been avowedly attached to ladies whose very existence is unascertained at this day, though volumes have been written, proving nothing more than (to borrow the comprehensive judgment of sir Roger de Coverley) that "much may be said on both sides."

In the mean time, whatever was the subsequent conduct of Alfonso towards Tasso, there seems to be no doubt that, for a considerable period during which the poet was engaged upon his great work, the duke countenanced him in the way most agreeable to his literary ambition and his personal vanity; for he loved rich apparel, splendid apartments, sumptuous fare, and to be associated with persons of the highest rank—feeling that he could adorn and dignify the circle in which he moved, both as a man of genius exalted above competition by intellectual endowments, and as a man of the world qualified to shine in external demeanour among gentlemen and soldiers as well as among students and men of letters. During this prosperous period—when the smiles of princesses, who were pleased to receive the homage of his muse, flattered his gentler affections, and the favour of sovereigns gratified the pride of a heart easily elevated to an eminence of self-satisfaction, from which the fall when it came was the more terrible, and the dashing to pieces of its hopes and its claims the more humiliating and deplorable—Tasso accompanied the cardinal Luigi as legate to the court of France. Here his fame had prepared the way for his reception with peculiar honour by Charles IX., himself both a lover of verse and a versifier. It is said that the king offered the poet some splendid presents, which the latter declined to accept, though he was so scantily provided with a wardrobe, that he left the kingdom, at the end of twelve months, in the same suit of clothes in which he entered it. The snake has but one skin, but while that is wearing out another is forming beneath: it would be well for poets, who live on court expectations, if they were as well provided.

As not many personal anecdotes are related of our poet, two or three indifferent ones may be given here as specimens of the tone of his conversation and address in public. A poet of some repute having committed a crime for which he was condemned to die, Tasso resolved to obtain, if possible, a mitigation of the punishment. At the palace he learned that the sentence was about to be executed immediately. Undiscouraged, however, he pressed forward; and being admitted to the presence, he thus addressed the king:—"May it please your majesty, I am come to implore you to put to death a wretch, who has brought disgrace upon philosophy, by showing that she cannot stand out against human depravity." The king, struck with the turn of the request, spared the criminal. Being asked by his majesty one day, "Whether men most resembled God in happiness, in sovereign power, or in the ability to do good?" Tasso replied, "Men can resemble God only by their virtue."—Again, before the same monarch a discussion was held to determine what condition in life is most unfortunate. "In my opinion," said Tasso, "the most deplorable condition is that of an impatient old man, borne down by poverty, who has neither fortune to preserve him from want, nor philosophy to support himself under suffering."

In the course of this journey, whatever he may have gained in honour at the French court, gratification in the society of eminent contemporaries, and knowledge of the country and people of his hero, Godfrey, Torquato lost the favour of cardinal Luigi, as Ariosto forfeited that of the cardinals kinsman and predecessor, Hippolyto of Este; though not for the same reason—want of servility to his highness (Luigi probably not exacting such base homage as Ariosto's barbarian patron had done), but for having manifested more zeal for the catholic faith than, in the opinion of some of his confidants, was deemed politic at a time, when, for the most treacherous purposes, previous to the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the protestants were treated with unwonted indulgence, to throw them off their guard. Hereupon he returned to Italy, though not immediately to Ferrara; for, travelling in company with Manzuoli, the secretary of the late embassy, we find that he arrived at Rome in January, 1572. Here he was cordially welcomed by many of his father's old acquaintances, as well as greatly distinguished for his own sake. Pope Pius V. honoured him with an audience, and the privilege of kissing his foot.

Through the mediation of the duchess of Urbino and Leonora, he was soon afterwards formally admitted into the service of Alfonso, with a pension of a hundred and eighty gold crowns a year, and the understanding that no personal duties would be required of him; but that he should be at liberty to pursue his studies and finish his poem at his own leisure. Generous as this provision undoubtedly was, it yet made him a captive in golden chains, too weak to bind the limbs, but strong enough to enthral the soul and enslave the mind. So, at least, Torquato found his obligation; and even when on both sides it had been broken, after his second imprisonment, he was never in spirit enfranchised from the yoke of Alfonso, till death set him free. His own testimony concerning his patron's munificence at this time, long after he had lost his favour, is honourable to both:—"He raised me from the darkness of my low estate to the light and glory of his court; he removed me from penury to abundance; he exceedingly enhanced the value of my works, by often and willing listening while I read, and treating their author with every mark of esteem. He placed me at his table, and countenanced me with his personal attention; and he never denied me a favour which I requested."

Under these auspices, while Tasso was still vigorously prosecuting that splendid crusade of his muse, the poetical siege of Jerusalem, and had now nearly made himself master of it for an everlasting stronghold of his poetical sovereignty, his exuberant mind poured out multitudes of sonnets, canzoni, and other miscellanies in verse and prose—almost entirely on transient themes, love fancies, and panegyrical attempts—

Among these, in the composition of which it might be questioned whether he was wasting his genius or cultivating it, he produced something more excellent, in the form of a pastoral drama. Accordingly, the most beautiful offspring of his imagination—so far as refers to exquisite grace of diction, and consummate skill in adorning a subject altogether artificial, and feigning a state of society that never did, never could, never ought to exist,—in a story not very natural though the incidents are few, nor very happily connected or intelligibly developed,—his "Aminta" appeared, written in flowing verse of various measures without rhyme, and enriched with lyric chorusses of extraordinary elegance. How the public exhibition of such a drama could be tolerated, before the most exalted personages of the state, ladies of the highest character, and religionists of the most plausible professions, is very difficult for us, in our cold climate, and with our severer as well as juster sentiments of decorum, to imagine. All that can be said in extenuation of the audience, and perhaps of the poet, comes to this presumption, that, though the piece abounds with descriptions and allusions the most voluptuous and fascinating to awaken the most perilous passions in youth, and which no gravity of age ought to endure, such were the manners of the day, and so little of evil was apprehended, where the serpent, that allured Eve with his wiles of beauty among the flowers of paradise, put on this pastoral disguise of the innocence of the golden age, that the fair and the virtuous alike imagined themselves as guiltless in listening to his blandishments, as Milton represents the mother of mankind to have been unsuspicious of danger, when she followed the tempter to the forbidden tree, and entered into a parley with him there, till at length, beguiled by his subtilty, "she plucked, she ate." And here a subject too delicate to be handled on the present occasion must be left to every one's conscience who indulges in the luxury of such reading as the work under consideration furnishes. It is remarkable that the author, designating himself under the name of Tirsi, seems to have been forewarned of the malady which soon afterwards overwhelmed him, and to which, no doubt, from constitutional temperament he had been prone from his youth upward, and which, in premature old age, cast such clouds of mystery over the gloom and splendour of his latter life. "Knowest thou not what Tirsi wrote, when, fired with frenzy, he wandered through the forest, at once moving laughter and pity among the lovely nymphs and shepherds? Nor wrote he even then 'things worthy to be laughed at, although he did such things.'"

The duchess of Urbino being absent from Ferrara, when Tasso's muse, like Habington's "halcyon," produced

invited him to her delightful retirement of Casteldurante, where she heard the pastoral strains from his own lips, which, though not eloquent from natural infirmity, would yet convey the soul and passion, the delicacy and pathos, of every passage, with an impression which no actor on the stage, nor indeed any reader but himself, could give. The living voice, in this case, would be the actual language of the spirit that conceived the thoughts, speaking to the spirit of her who received them through the ear, fresh and flowing from the fountain in his heart; for the written copy, to the eye, would be but a translation, wanting the incommunicable accompaniments of tone, look, expression, and perfect intelligence of the whole in all its bearings and meanings, such as the original author alone could possess; for, as Dr. Johnson said, "no words can convey sounds;" and both sounds and words were requisite to do justice to such verse as his. Tasso remained several months with the duchess.

All Italy soon echoed with the fame of this poetical phenomenon, which, though not the first of the kind, (an indifferent model having been produced six years before, by one Arienti,) it was the first that had power to compel almost universal admiration, and establish a precedent and authority for that fantastic species of literary composition. Imitations, by the most gifted of his contemporaries, sprang up in rapid succession, and passed away as rapidly, with the exception of one, the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini, which not only maintained its ground, but even disputed that on which its forerunner stood, and from which no rivalry has ever yet been able to remove it. The renown which Tasso acquired by the "Aminta" naturally exasperated envy in proportion as it commanded applause, and among the multitude of competitors who could not soar to his elevation, there were not wanting those who employed every artifice to bring him down to their level, that they might trample him under foot. Whatever were the causes, Tasso to the end of his life was persecuted as much by unmerciful critics as he was oppressed by hard-hearted patrons.

But the "Aminta" was not the only episodal enterprise of Tasso, while he was slowly but unweariedly proceeding with the "Gerusalemme." Flushed with the success of his pastoral drama, he set earnestly about the construction of a regular tragedy; but he had not advanced far in the second act, when the project was suspended, and the fragment of fine promise which remains, compared with the completed performance long afterwards, when his faculties were on the decline, exhibits a brilliant but melancholy contrast of "the change" that had come "o'er the spirit of his dream"—his dream of life, love, and glory, blighting his "May of youth," and causing him in the prime of manhood to "fall into the sere and yellow leaf." His "Torindo," as this failure was styled, was less a failure than the "Torrismondo," as the resumed and perfected task was called.

Towards the conclusion of his toils on his main work (as he fondly hoped), but the beginning of a series of miseries consequent upon it, from which he found no end but in the grave, Tasso was seized with a violent fever. This left him in such a state of bodily exhaustion, that it was not till the following spring (1575), that from the last lines of his poem he could look back upon all the intervening ones to the first, as the links of a chain, more subtle than air, yet stronger than adamant, which should deliver his thoughts as he had bound them in his words, from generation to generation, to delight millions of minds, so long as his country's language should be understood. He had already enjoyed such exhilarating foretastes of fame by the circulation in manuscript of portions of the poem, as they came completed from his hands, that he was the less prepared to encounter the enmity and opposition, which rancorous and intriguing rivals, or fanatic and supercilious ecclesiastical censors of the press, immediately commenced, and inveterately continued to manifest towards him to the close of life. There was in Tasso—conscious as he must have been of his powers, and confident as he must have felt in the exercise of his own judgment—a readiness to submit to learned and candid criticism, and a willingness to concede to dissentient opinions on minor points of taste, so far as was consistent with manly independence,—which can rarely be found among men of first-rate talents, but yet might be expected from a court poet, accustomed in other matters to defer to superiors, be compliant towards equals, and condescending to inferiors. This disposition, however, which ought to have conciliated envy herself, only provoked her the more to assume every shape of candour or malignity, as best suited her humour, to torment and distract him, that she might revel over his wretchedness, if she could not accomplish his fall. Years intervened while the "Gerusalemme Liberata," in its finished form, was undergoing as many ordeals almost as he had friends, and its author suffering almost as many martyrdoms as he had enemies. Into the particulars of these persecutions it is not necessary to enter here. The poet was certainly induced by the force of arguments used by some, and the terror of inquisitorial powers exercised by others of his critics, to alter, expunge, and amend many parts of the poem, which, after all, suffered little from the processes to which it was thus exposed before its publication. That publication, however, was long delayed by such vexatious hinderances, and at last was effected surreptitiously, to the great offence and injury of the author, then in confinement as a lunatic.

Tasso's malady was grievously aggravated by these excruciating criticisms, when he found himself, on the one hand, charged with heresy against Aristotle and good taste, and, on the other, with heresy against the church and good morals. Fevers, headaches, strange dreams, waking suspicions, restlessness, disappointment, dissatisfaction with his patron, to whom he had dedicated his poem, and in honour of whom he had created his imaginary hero, Rinaldo,—perhaps, too, the bitterness of desponding passion, though that is questionable,—suggested to him the idea of absconding from Ferrara and taking refuge at Rome, where he purposed to bring out the "Gerusalemme," at his own pleasure, and hoped to reap a considerable pecuniary benefit from the sale. Alfonso, however, was not willing to lose the glory of the dedication to himself, though he seems to have wanted the generosity, the humanity, the justice to deal with the author except as an impotent creature in his power, who could do him much honour by flattering his pride, but to whom he showed at best but stinted kindness. To secure his selfish object, he made the poet a prisoner near his own person,—both at Ferrara, and at his palace of Belriguardo in the country,—a prisoner at large, indeed, but under perpetual observation. Of this the sufferer was aware; and the very idea of a human eye for ever upon him, restraining his looks, words, and actions, poring over him while he slept, haunting his dreams, and entering into his very thoughts—for so he must have felt as though it did—this alone was enough to madden a man of iron heart and millstone brain, much more a poor hypochondriac, as Tasso had already become.

Notwithstanding the jealousies of Alfonso, and the fascinations of his sisters to detain him, the capricious bard escaped from his splendid captivity to Rome,—and escaped even with the permission of the duke; who gave him a letter of recommendation to the cardinal Hippolyto, to befriend him as a stranger there, for the avowed purpose of obtaining the accustomed indulgence granted to visiters during the jubilee. Here he met with the cardinal Ferdinand de' Medici, afterwards grand duke of Tuscany, who renewed to him in person the tender of an honourable asylum (formerly intimated to him in private), should he be disposed to leave altogether the service of Alfonso. The offer was gratefully acknowledged, but not formally accepted; and after six weeks of holidays (as he felt them to be) spent in the luxury of literary intercourse, and the renewal of the impressions which the scene of Rome's posthumous glory in her magnificent ruins, and her not less imposing revival in her hierarchal pomp, had left on his mind in youth, he returned by way of Sienna and Florence to Ferrara. Here, while his poem was going through a second round of critical purgatory, and his soul was sinking under the burden of censures laid upon him, like the spirits of the proud in Dante, condemned to bear enormous stones along the uneven uphill road, he received the appointment of historiographer to the house of Este, with a small stipend, which laid upon him another cobweb obligation to remain at Ferrara. What were the duties of this office it is of no consequence to inquire; he does not seem even to have performed any, nor perhaps did he owe any; his fable of the origin of that family from his hero Rinaldo—the Rinaldo of his "Gerusalemme"—had already conferred on it more of that glory which princes covet, than the true history of all its ancestors might have done. When the results of the aforesaid second revisal of his poem were communicated to him, in despair of conciliating his critics, and determined not to yield altogether to their incompetent authority, on points where he felt himself strong in poetical power to produce the very effects which they deprecated, but which he had aimed at and achieved most triumphantly, he composed an interpretation of the whole as an extended allegory, spiritualising its heroes and its scenes, with more perverse ingenuity than felicity of success. Of this it may be fairly said, that if the original were mainly fiction, the moral was wholly so. His censors, however, persisted in condemning the voluptuous passages to which he himself was most attached, because he knew them to be the most beautiful, and recked not that they were the most seductive. In this respect the poet himself was the Rinaldo of his sorceress muse, who by her enchantments had wholly captivated his heart, and carried him away to her "limbo of vanity;" from which Sperone and Antoniano, his remorseless critics, in vain endeavoured to deliver him; as Carlo and Ubaldo had rescued his hero from the thralls of Armida in her island of sensual delights. He never yielded all, though he conceded many things, and sacrificed several extravagant inventions, by which the poem, was rather mended than mutilated.