CHAPTER IX

ST. ONOFRIO AND TASSO

One of the most romantic shrines of pilgrimage in Rome is the church

of St. Onofrio. It is situated in the Trastevere, that portion of the

city beyond the Tiber whose inhabitants boast of their pure descent

from the ancient Romans. A steep ascent on the slope of the Janiculum,

through a somewhat squalid but picturesque street, and terminating in

a series of broad steps, leads up to it from the Porta di San Spirito,

not far from the Vatican. The ground here is open and stretches away,

free from buildings, to the walls of the city. The church has a simple

old-fashioned appearance; its roof, walls, and small campanile are

painted with the rusty gold of lichens that have sprung from the

kisses of four centuries of rain and sun. It was erected in the reign

of Pope Eugenius IV. by Nicolo da Forca Palena, an ancestor of that

Conte di Palena who was a great friend of Torquato Tasso at Naples. It

was dedicated to the Egyptian hermit Honuphrius, who for sixty years

lived in a cave in the desert of Thebes, without seeing a human being

or speaking a word, consorting with birds and beasts, and living upon

roots and wild herbs. A subtle harmony is felt between the history of

the hermit and the character of this building raised in his honour. A

spot more drowsy and secluded, more steeped in the dreams of the older

ages, is not to be found in the whole city. In front of the church

there is a long, narrow portico, supported by eight antique columns

of the simplest construction, in all likelihood borrowed from some old

pagan temple. Under this portico is a beautiful fresco of the Madonna

and Child by Domenichino. To the right are three lunettes, which

contain paintings by the same great master, representing the Baptism,

Temptation, and Flagellation of St. Jerome. On the left of the arcade

are portraits of the most prominent saints of the Hieronomyte order.

Exposed to the weather at first, these invaluable frescoes had faded

into mere spectres of pictures; but they are now protected from

further injury by glass.

Usually the church is closed, except in the early morning, and

visitors are admitted by the custode on ringing a door bell under the

portico. The interior is dark and solemn, with much less gilding and

meretricious ornament than is usual in Roman churches. It contains, in

the side chapels, many objects of interest; frescoes and altar-pieces

by Annibale Caracci, Pinturicchio, and Peruzzi; and splendid

sepulchral monuments. Of the last the most conspicuous are the marble

tomb of Alessandro Guidi, the Italian lyric poet, who died in 1712;

and the simple cenotaph in the last chapel on the left of one of the

titular cardinals of the church, who died in 1849, the celebrated

linguist Mezzofante. But the tomb upon which the visitor will gaze

with deepest interest is that of Torquato Tasso, who died in the

adjacent monastery in 1595. The chapel of St. Jerome, in which it is

situated, the first on the left as you enter, was restored by public

subscription in 1857, in a manner which does not reflect much credit

upon the artistic taste of modern Rome. Previous to this the remains

of the poet reposed for two hundred years in an obscure part of the

church close to the door, indicated by a tablet. Above this spot there

is a portrait of the time, which from an artistic point of view is

very poor, but is said to be a good likeness. Removed on the

anniversary of his death, about thirty years ago, to the chapel of St.

Jerome, the poet's remains are now covered by a huge marble monument

in the cinque-cento style, adorned by a bas-relief of his funeral and

a statue of him by Fabris. Whatever may be said regarding the artistic

merits of this monument, no one who has read the poet's immortal epic,

and is conversant with the sad incidents of his life, can stand on the

spot without being deeply moved.

Connected with the church is a monastery dedicated to St. Jerome. In

one of the upper corridors is a beautiful arched fresco of the Madonna

and Child, by Leonardo da Vinci, with the donor of the picture in

profile kneeling before her. The picture is surrounded by a frame of

fruit and flowers on an enamelled ground. The soft, tender features of

the infant Jesus, and the quiet dignity and grace of the smiling

Madonna, are so characteristic of the style of Leonardo da Vinci that

the picture would be at once referred to him by one who did not know

its origin. The chamber where Tasso spent the last days of his life is

on the upper floor, and is the most conveniently situated in the whole

building. It is left very much in the same state as when he lived in

it. The walls and ceiling are bare and whitewashed, without any

decoration. Here and there are several pale marks, indicating the

places of objects that had been removed. In one part is painted on the

plaster a false door partially open, behind which is seen the figure

of Tasso about to enter; but every person of good taste must condemn

the melodramatic exhibition, and wish that he could obliterate it with

a daub of whitewash. The custode directed my attention to it with an

air of great admiration, and could not understand the scowl with which

I turned away my face. There are several most interesting relics of

Tasso preserved in this chamber--his table, with an inkstand of wood;

his great chair covered with Cordova leather, very aged and

worn-looking; the belt which he wore; a small German cabinet; a large

China bowl, evidently an heirloom; a metal crucifix of singular

workmanship, given to him by Pope Clement VIII., which soothed his

dying moments; several of his letters, and an autograph copy of

verses. In one corner is the leaden coffin, much corroded, in which

his remains were originally deposited. On the table is a mask in

reddish wax moulded from the dead face of the poet, and placed upon a

plaster bust--a most fantastic combination. From this mask, which is

an undoubted original, numerous copies have been taken, which are

scattered throughout Europe. It is in consequence somewhat effaced,

but it still shows the characteristic features of the poet--the purity

of the profile, the fineness of the mouth, and the spiritual beauty

and fascinating expression of the whole face. But the incoherence of

the adaptation makes it painful to think that this is the best

representation of the poet we possess.

The extensive garden behind the convent combines a considerable

variety of natural features. The monks grow large quantities of

lettuce and fennochio; and interspersed among the beds of vegetables

are orange and other fruit trees, and little trellises of cane,

wreathed with vines. A large tank is supplied with water from a spring

whose murmur gives a feeling of animation to the spot. The garden

rises at the end into broken elevated ground showing the native rock

through its grassy sides. A row of tall old cypresses crowns the

ridge--their fluted trunks gray with lichen-stains, and their deep

green spires of foliage forming harp-strings on which the evening

winds discourse solemn music, as if the spirit of the poet haunted

them still. On one side are the picturesque ruins of a shrine

overarching a fountain, now dry and choked up with weeds, and fringed

with ferns. Cyclamens--called by the Italians _viola pazze_, "mad

violets"--grow on its margin in glowing masses; sweet-scented violets

in profusion perfume all the air; and a few Judas-trees, loaded with

crimson blossoms, without a single leaf to relieve the gorgeous

colour, serve as an admirable background, almost blending with the

clouds on the low horizon. On the other side the hill slopes down in a

series of terraces to the crowded streets of the Trastevere, forming

a spacious out-door amphitheatre, in which the Arcadian Academy of

Rome used to hold its meetings during the summer months, and where St.

Filippo Neri was wont to give those half-dramatic musical

entertainments which, originating in the oratory of the religious

community established by him, are now known throughout the world as

oratorios. Between these two objects still stands the large torso of a

tree which bears the name of "Tasso's oak," because the poet's

favourite seat was under its shadow. It suffered much from the

violence of a thunderstorm in 1842, but numerous branches have since

sprouted from the old trunk, and it now affords a capacious shade from

the noonday heat. It is a variety of the Valonia oak, with delicate,

downy, pale-green leaves, much serrated, and contrasts beautifully

with the dark green spires of the cypresses behind. The leaves at the

time of my visit had but recently unfolded, and exhibited all the

delicacy of tint and perfection of outline so characteristic of young

foliage. The garden was in the first fresh flush of spring--that

idyllic season which, in Italy more than in any other land, realises

the glowing descriptions of the poets. Plucking a leafy twig from the

branches and a gray lichen from the trunk as mementoes of the place, I

sat down on the mossy hole, and tried to bring back in imagination the

haunted past. Nature was renewing her old life; the same flowers still

covered the earth with their divine frescoes; but where was he whose

spirit informed all the beauty and translated its mystic language into

human words? The permanency of nature and the vanity of human life

seemed here to acquire new significance.

The spot on which I sat commands one of the finest views of Rome and

the surrounding country. Down below to the left is the enormous group

of buildings connected with St Peter's and the Vatican, whose yellow

travertine glows in the afternoon sun like dead gold. Beyond rise the

steep green slopes of Monte Mario, with vineyards and olive-groves

nestling in its warm folds, crowned with the Villa Mellini beside the

"Turner pine," a familiar object in many of the great artist's

pictures. Stretching away in the direction of the old diligence road

from Florence is a succession of gentle ridges and bluffs of volcanic

rock covered with brushwood, among which you can trace the bold

headland of the citadel of Fidenæ, and the green lonely site of

Antemnæ, and the plateau on which are the scanty remains of the almost

mythical Etruscan city of Veii, the Troy of Italy. The view in this

direction is bounded by the advanced guard of the Sabine range, the

blue peak of Soracte looking, as Lord Byron graphically says, like the

crest of a billow about to break. In front, at your feet, is the city,

broken up into the most picturesque masses by the irregularity of the

ground; here and there a brighter light glistening on some stately

campanile or cupola, and flashing back from the graceful columns of

Trajan and Antonine. The Tiber flows between you and that wilderness

of reddish-brown roofs cleaving the city in twain. For a brief space

you see it on both sides of the Bridge of Hadrian, overlooked by the

gloomy mass of the Castle of St. Angelo, and then it hides itself

under the shadow of the Aventine Hill, and at last emerges beyond the

walls, to pursue its desolate way to the sea through one of the

saddest tracts of country in all the world. Away to the right, where

the mass of modern buildings ceases, the great shattered circle of the

Colosseum stands up against the sky, indicating by its presence where

lie, unseen from this point of view, the ruins of the palaces of the

Cæsars and the Forum. Beyond the city stretches away the undulating

bosom of the Campagna, bathed in a misty azure light; bridged over by

the weird, endless arches of the Claudian aqueduct, throwing long

shadows before them in the westering sun. Worthy framework for such a

picture, the noble semicircle of the Sabine Hills rises on the horizon

to the left, terminating in the grand rugged peak of Monte Gennaro,

whose every cliff and scar are distinctly visible, and concealing in

its bosom the romantic waterfalls of Tivoli and the lone ancestral

farm of Horace. On the right the crested Alban heights form the

boundary, crowned on the summit with the white convent of Monte

Cavo--the ancient temple of Jupiter Latialis, up to which the Roman

consuls came to triumph when the Latin States were merged in the Roman

Commonwealth--and bearing on their shoulders the sparkling, gem-like

towns of Frascati and Albano, with their thrilling memories of Cicero

and Pompey; the whole range melting away into the blue vault of heaven

in delicate gradations of pale pink and purple. In the wide gap

between these ranges of hills--beyond the stone pines and ilex groves

of Præneste--the far perspective is closed by a glorious vision of the

snow-crowned mountains of the Abruzzi, giving an air of alpine

grandeur to the view. And all this vast and varied landscape,

comprehending all glories of nature and art, all zones and climates,

from the tropical aloes and palms of the Pincian Hill to the arctic

snows of the Apennines, is seen through air that acts upon the spirits

like wine, and gives the ideal beauty of a picture to the meanest

things.

Italian poets share in the wonderful charm that belongs to everything

connected with their lovely land. They are seen, like the early Tuscan

paintings, against a golden background of romance. Petrarch, Dante,

Ariosto, invested with this magic light, are themselves more

attractive even than their poetic creations. But Torquato Tasso,

perhaps, more than them all, appeals to our deepest feelings. No

sadder or more romantic life than his can be found in the annals of

literature. He was one of those "infanti perduti" to whom life was one

long avenue of darkened days. In his temperament, in the character of

his genius, and in the story of his life, we can discern striking

features of resemblance between him and the wayward, sorrowful

Rousseau. Hercules, according to the old fable, "was afflicted with

madness as a punishment for his being so near the gods;" and the

imaginativeness of a brain which had in it a fibre of insanity, near

which genius often perilously lies, may be supposed to account for

much that is strange and sad in his career. The place of his birth was

a fit cradle for a poet. On the edge of a bold cliff, overlooking the

sea at Sorrento, is the Hotel Tasso, known to every traveller in that

region. Here, according to the voice of tradition, the immortal poet

was born on the 11th of March 1544, eleven years after the death of

Ariosto. It is said that the identical chamber in which the event took

place has since disappeared, owing to the portion of rock on which it

stood having been undermined by the sea; and, as if to give

countenance to this, some of the existing apartments are perilously

propped up on the very edge of the cliff by buttresses, which, giving

way, would hurl the superstructure into the abyss. The original

building stood on the site of an ancient temple; and it is probable

that, with the exception of one of the bedrooms, which is said to have

been Tasso's cabinet, the edifice retains none of the features which

it possessed in the days of the poet.

But whatever changes may have taken place in the human habitation, the

scenes of Nature around, from which he drew the inspirations of his

youthful genius, remain unchanged. Every feature of landscape

loveliness is focussed in that matchless panorama. Behind is a range

of wild mountains, whose many-shaped peaks and crags, clad with pine

and olive, assume, as the day wears on, the golden and purple hues of

the sky--sloping down into the midst of vineyards and groves of

orange, myrtle, and all the luxuriant verdure which the warm sun of

the South calls forth, out of which gleam at frequent intervals

picturesque villages and farms, which seem more the creation of Nature

than of Art. In front is a glorious view of the Bay of Naples, with

the enchanted isles of Capri and Ischia sleeping on its bosom, and the

reflected images of domes and palaces all along its curving shores

"charming its blue waters;" while dominating the whole horizon are

the snowy mountains of Campania, broken by the dark purple mass of

Vesuvius, rising up with gradual slope to its rounded cone, over which

rests continually a column of flame or smoke, "stimulating the

imagination by its mystery and terror." Apart from its associations,

that landscape would have been one to gaze on entranced, and to dream

of for years afterwards. But with its countless memories of all that

is greatest and saddest in human history clinging to almost every

object, it is indeed one of the most impressive in the world. The land

is the land of Magna Græcia. The sea is the sea of Homer and Pindar.

Near at hand are the Isles of the Sirens, who allured Ulysses with

their magic song; away in the dim distance are the wonderful Doric

temples of Pæstum, which go back to the mythical times of Jason and

the Argonauts. On the opposite shore is the tomb of Virgil, on the

threshold of the scenes which he loved to describe,--the Holy Land of

Paganism, the Phlegræan Fields, with the terrible Avernus and the Cave

of the Sibyl, and all the spots associated with the Pagan heaven and

hell; and in the near neighbourhood Baiæ, with its awful memories of

Roman luxury and cruelty, and Puteoli, with its inspiring associations

of the Apostle Paul's visit, and the introduction of Christianity into

Italy. Meet nurse for any poetic child, the place of his birth was

peculiarly so for such a child as Tasso; and we can detect in the

subjects of his Muse in after years, the very themes which such a

region would naturally have suggested and inspired.

The age in which he was born was also eminently favourable for the

development of the poetic faculty. By the wonderful discoveries of the

starry Galileo, man's intellectual vision was infinitely extended, and

the great fundamental idea of modern astronomy--infinite space peopled

with worlds like our own--was for the first time realised. It was an

era of maritime enterprise; the world was circumnavigated, and new

ideas streamed in from each newly-visited region. It was

pre-eminently the period of art. Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael had

just passed away, but Michael Angelo, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul

Veronese were still living, freeing men's spirits by the productions

of their pencil from formal fancies and conventional fetters, and

sending them back to the fresh teaching of Nature. The art of printing

was giving a new birth to letters, and the reformation of religion a

new growth to human thought. A new power had descended into the

stagnant waters of European life, and imparted to them a wonderful

energy. Along with the revival of classical learning and the general

quickening of men's minds, there was blended in the South of Europe a

lingering love of romance and chivalry, and a strong religious

feeling, which had arisen out of the vigorous reaction of Roman

Catholicism. Italy was at this time the acknowledged parent both of

the poetry and the general literature of Europe; and the immortal

works of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto had formed an almost perfect

vernacular language in which the creations of genius could find

fittest expression.

But Tasso was not only born in a poetic region and in a poetic age: he

was also the son of a poet. He inherited the divine faculty; he was

cradled in poetry. His father, Bernardo, though he has been put into

the shade by his more gifted son, has claims of his own to be

remembered by posterity. He occupies a high place in the well-defined

group of the chivalric poets of Italy. His principal poem, the

_Amadigi_, which was composed about the time of his son's birth,

though not published for sixteen years afterwards, treats in a hundred

cantos the romantic history of Amadis of Gaul, and deals in giants,

enchanted swords, prodigious wounds, and miraculous cures. Various

estimates of this long poem have been formed by critics from the

favourable analysis of Ginguéné to the severe censure of Sismondi. But

in spite of its lack of dramatic power, and the monotony of its

imagery, the heat of his genius crystallising only a part of the

substance of his work, there can be no question that the poem is

distinguished by a certain gravity and elevation of sentiment, which

places it high above the romances of the older school, and brings it

near to the dignity of epic poetry. In this respect the _Amadigi_ may

be said to form an interesting transition from the irregular romance

of Ariosto to the symmetrical epic of his own son. The son's poetic

path was thus prepared, and the mould in which his immortal work was

cast was formed by his father. The fortunes of the two poets read

remarkably alike. They are marked by the same extraordinary

vicissitudes, and the same general sadness and gloom.

The family of Tasso belonged to Bergamo, in the north of Italy, a

region which has given birth to several eminent men, among others to

Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian literature. It was originally

noble, and had large territorial possessions. One ancestor, Omodeo,

who lived in the year 1290, is worthy of special mention as the

inventor of the system of postal communication, to which the world

owes so much; and hence the family arms of a courier's horn and a

badger's skin--tasso being the Italian for badger--which the

post-horses, down to within fifty years ago, wore upon their harness.

In the time of Bernardo, however, the fortunes of the family had

decayed, and the early days of the poet were passed in poverty.

Adopted after the death of his parents by his father's brother, the

Bishop of Recanati, he was placed at school, where he soon acquired a

wonderful familiarity with the Greek and Latin authors, then newly

restored to Europe. Highly cultivated, refined, and possessed of great

personal beauty, while manifesting at the same time a peculiar talent

for diplomacy, Bernardo speedily won his way to distinction. His first

work, which was a collection principally of love-poems, celebrating

his passion for the beautiful Genevra Malatesta, who belonged to the

same family as the ill-fated Parasina of Byron, attracted the

attention of the reigning Prince of Salerno, Ferrante Sanseverino,

one of the chief patrons of literature in Italy, who thereupon engaged

him as his private secretary. At the court of this prince he met

Porzia de' Rossi, a lady of noble birth, who was beautiful and

accomplished, and possessed what was considered in those days a large

fortune. After his marriage with this lady Bernardo and his bride

retired to a villa which he had purchased at Sorrento, where he

enjoyed for several years an exceptional share of domestic felicity,

his wife having proved a most devoted helpmeet to him.

In these propitious circumstances the infant that was destined

afterwards to confer the greatest lustre upon the family name was

born. His father was absent at the time with the Prince of Salerno,

who had joined the Spanish army in the new war that had arisen between

Charles V. and Francis I.; a war whose chivalrous and inspiring acts

the Marquis d'Azeglio made use of in 1866 in his romance of history,

_Fieramosca_, to rouse again a spirit of independence in his

countrymen. A friend of his father, therefore, held the child at the

baptismal font, in the cathedral of Sorrento, where he received the

name of Torquato--a name which his elder brother, who lived only a few

days, had previously borne. The treaty of Crepi, which concluded the

war between Charles V. and Francis I., in which the former was

victorious, allowed Bernardo Tasso to return home with his patron ten

months after the birth of his son. By this treaty the French king, who

had previously assumed the title of King of Naples, resigned all

claims upon that State, and the inhabitants were henceforth subjected

entirely to the dominion of the Spanish sovereigns of the house of

Austria. The emperor, Charles V., appointed the Marquis de

Villafranca, better known as Don Pedro de Toledo, to be Viceroy of

Naples, who, like his despotic master, carried out his so-called

reforms with a high hand, and interfered with the personal and

domestic affairs of the inhabitants, so that he speedily roused their

resentment. Against the establishment of the Inquisition, which he set

about under the mask of zeal for religion, but in reality for the

intimidation of the nobles, the whole city rose up in violent

opposition. After having exhausted itself in a vain struggle with the

viceroy, it resolved to petition the emperor, and commissioned the

Prince of Salerno to plead its cause at the Court of Nuremberg. But in

consequence of being forestalled by the cunning Don Pedro, the prince,

when he arrived, found the case prejudged, and all his arguments and

pleadings were of no avail. Disgusted with the failure of his errand,

with the coldness of his reception, and with other indignities which

he received at the hands of the emperor and his viceroy, he determined

to abandon altogether the cause of Austria. Repairing to Venice, he

publicly gave effect to his decision; whereupon Don Pedro, too glad to

have an opportunity of oppressing his personal enemy, declared the

prince a rebel, confiscated his estates, and seized all his personal

property. In the misfortunes of his patron Bernardo Tasso shared. He

too was proscribed as a rebel; his property at Salerno was seized, and

his wife and children were transferred by the viceroy's orders to

Naples, where her family resided, and where, under their cruel

treatment, instigated by the viceroy, she was deprived of her fortune,

and virtually held a prisoner to the day of her death.

Such were the dark clouds that, after a brief gleam of the brightest

prosperity, hung over the early years of Torquato Tasso. Deprived of

the care of a father who followed from court to court the varied

fortunes of his benefactor, and in the company of a mother worse than

widowed, dependent upon the cold and niggardly charity of friends who

were either too timid or superstitious to oppose the patron of the

Inquisition, the child grew up in melancholy solitude, like an

etiolated plant that has been deprived of the sunshine. The original

sadness and sensitiveness of his disposition was much increased by the

family misfortunes. In his seventh year he was sent to a school in

the neighbourhood, opened by the Jesuits, who were at this time

beginning to exert a powerful influence upon society, principally on

account of their zeal in the cause of education. At this school he

remained for three years, acquiring a wonderful knowledge of Latin and

Greek, and manifesting such enthusiasm in his studies that he rose

long before day-break, and was so impatient to get to school that his

mother was often obliged to send him away in the dark with a lantern.

Here he showed the first symptoms of his genius for poetry and

rhetoric, and gave public testimony to the deep religious feeling

which he inherited from his parents, and which had been so carefully

cultivated by his ecclesiastical masters, by joining the communion of

the Church. In his tenth year his father left the court of Henry III.

of France, and settled in Rome, where he had apartments assigned him

in the immense palace of Cardinal Hippolito of the house of Ferrara.

These apartments were furnished as handsomely as his impoverished

resources allowed, in the hope that he might have his wife and

children to live with him. But in spite of all his efforts and

entreaties his wife was not allowed by her brothers to rejoin him;

while his own position as an outlaw made it impossible for him to

enter the kingdom of Naples to rescue her. The only concession he

could get from the authorities was permission for her to enter with

her daughter Cornelia as pensioners among the nuns in the convent of

San Festo; and no sooner was this step taken than her friends openly

seized her dowry, on the plea that it would otherwise belong to the

convent, as her husband's outlawry cancelled his claims to it. Her

boy, of course, could not enter the convent with her; he was therefore

sent to his father in Rome. The separation between mother and son, we

are told, was most affecting. To her it was the climax of her trials;

and, bowed down beneath the weight of her accumulated sufferings, she

fell an easy victim to an attack of fever, which, in the short space

of twenty-four hours, ended her wretched life. Upon Tasso the parting

from a mother whom he was never to see again, and whose personal

qualities and grievous trials had greatly endeared her to him,

produced an impression which even the great troubles of his after life

could never efface.

With a mind richly stored, notwithstanding his youthful age, with

classic lore, and quickened and made sensitive by a varied and

sorrowful career, Torquato Tasso came to Rome. The first occasion of

seeing the imperial city must have been exciting and awakening in a

high degree to such a boy. He was leaving behind the passive

simplicity of the child, and had already a keen interest in the things

ennobled by history and cared for by grown-up men. This dawn of a

higher consciousness found a congenial sphere in the city of the soul.

With what absorbing eagerness his young mind would be drawn to the

study of the immortal deeds, which were the inheritance of his race,

on the very spot where they were done. He would behold with his eyes

the glorious things of which he had heard. There would be much that

would shock and disappoint him when he came to be familiar with it.

Many of the ancient monuments had been destroyed; and many of the

ancient sites, especially the Forum and the Palatine, were deserted

wastes which had not yet yielded up their buried treasures of art to

the pick and spade of the antiquarian. The ravages inflicted by the

ferocious hordes of the Constable Bourbon in 1527 had not yet been

obliterated by the restorations and repairs undertaken by Pope Paul

III. The city had lost much of its ancient glory, and had not yet

exchanged its gloomy medieval aspect for that of modern civilisation.

But, in spite of every drawback, he could not sufficiently admire the

buildings and the sites which bore witness of all that was grandest in

human history. Along with a young relative, Christopher Tasso, he

pursued his classical studies in the midst of all these stimulating

associations under the tutorship of Maurizio Cattaneo, the most

learned master in Italy. The companionship of a youth of his own age

did him a great deal of good. It satisfied his affections, it saved

him from the loneliness to which his father's ill-health at the time

would otherwise have consigned him, and it spurred him on to a

healthful exercise of his mental powers. For a short time he led a

comparatively happy life in Rome. His father's prospects had somewhat

improved. Cardinal Caraffa, who was a personal friend of his, ascended

the pontifical throne under the name of Paul IV.; and as they were on

the same political side, he hoped that his fortunes would now be

retrieved. But this gleam of prosperity speedily vanished. The

imperial enmity, which had been the cause of all his previous

misfortunes, continued to pursue him like a relentless fate. Philip

II. of Spain and the Pope having quarrelled, the formidable Duke of

Alba, the new Viceroy of Naples, invaded the Papal States, took Ostia

and Tivoli, and threatened Rome itself. With extreme difficulty

Bernardo Tasso managed to make his escape to Ravenna, with nothing

left him but the manuscript of his _Amadigi_. In the meantime his son

was taken to his relatives at Bergamo. In this city, under the shadow

of the Alps, Torquato remained for a year in the home of his Roman

schoolfellow. The inhabitants have ever since cherished with pride the

connection of the Tassos with their town, and have erected a splendid

monument to Torquato in the market-place. The exquisite scenery in the

neighbourhood had a wonderful effect upon the mind of the youthful

poet. It put the finishing touch to his varied education. The snows of

the North and the fires of the South, the wild grandeur of the

mountains and the soft beauty of the sea, the solitudes of Nature

where only the effects of storm and sunshine are chronicled, and the

crowded scenes of the most inspiring events in human history, had

their share in moulding his temperament and colouring his poetry.

From Bergamo Torquato was summoned to Pesaro, since known as the

birthplace of Rossini, hence called the "Swan of Pesaro." His father

had found a home with the Duke of Urbino, who treated him with the

utmost kindness. In the Villa Barachetto, on the shores of the

Adriatic, surrounded by the most beautiful scenery and by the finest

treasures of art, which have long since been transferred to Paris and

Rome, Bernardo Tasso at last completed his _Amadigi_; while,

captivated by his grace and intelligence, the duke made Torquato the

companion of his son, Francesco Maria, in all his studies and

amusements. For two years father and son enjoyed in this place a

grateful repose from the buffetings of fortune. But, fired by

ambition, Bernardo left Pesaro for Venice, in order to see his poem

through the press of Aldus Manutius; and being not only welcomed with

open arms by his literary friends in that city, but also appointed

secretary of the great Venetian Academy "Della Fama," with a handsome

salary, he sent for his son, took a house in a good situation, and

resolved to settle down in the place. There was much to captivate the

imagination of the youthful Torquato in this wonderful city of the

sea, then in the zenith of its fame, surpassing all the capitals of

transalpine Europe in the extent of its commerce, in refinement of

manners, and in the cultivation of learning and the arts. Its romantic

situation, its weird history, its splendid palaces, its silent

water-ways, its stirring commerce, its inspiring arts, must have

kindled all the enthusiasm of his nature. But he did not yield himself

up to the siren attractions of the place, and muse in idleness upon

its varied charms. On the contrary, the time that he spent in Venice

was the busiest of his life. He was absorbed in the study of Dante and

Petrarch; and the results of his devotion may still be seen in the

numerous annotations in his handwriting in the copies of these poets

which belonged to him, now preserved in the Vatican Library in Rome

and the Laurentian Library in Florence. He was also employed by his

father in transcribing for the press considerable portions of his

poetical works; and these studies and exercises were of much use to

him in enabling him to form a graphic and elegant literary style. His

own compositions, both in prose and verse, were by this time pretty

numerous, though nothing of his had found its way into print as yet.

His father saw with much concern the development of his son's genius.

Anxious to save him from the trials which he himself had experienced

in his literary career, he sent him to the University of Padua to

study law, which he thought would be a surer provision for his future

life than a devotion to the Muses. One great branch of law, that which

relates to ecclesiastical jurisprudence, has always been much esteemed

in Italy, and the study of it, in many instances, has paved the way to

high honours. Almost all the eminent poets of Italy, Petrarch,

Ariosto, Marino, Metastasio, spent their earlier years in this

pursuit; but, like Ovid and our own Milton, their nature rebelled

against the bondage. They took greater pleasure in the study of the

laws for rhyme than in the study of the Pandects of Justinian or the

Decretals of Isidore. It was so with Tasso. He attended faithfully the

lectures of Guido Panciroli, although these were not compulsory, and

waited patiently at the University during the three years of residence

which is required for a law degree. But all the time his mind was

occupied with other thoughts than those connected with his law

studies. Still, uncongenial as they must have been to him, he could

not have attended for three years to such studies without

unconsciously deriving much benefit from them. They must have

impressed upon him those ideas of order and logical arrangement which

he afterwards carried out in his writings, and which separate them so

markedly from the confused, inconsistent license of the older

literature of Italy; and he could not have resided in the birthplace

of Livy, in constant association with the highest minds of the time,

as a member of a University then the most famous in Europe, numbering

no less than ten thousand students from all parts of the world,

without his intellectual life being greatly quickened.

During ten months of enthusiastic work he produced his first great

poem, which, considering his age--for he was then only in his

eighteenth year--and the short time occupied in its composition, is

one of the most remarkable efforts of genius. He called his poem

_Rinaldo_, after the name of the knight whose romantic adventures it

celebrates--not the Rinaldo of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, but the

Paladin of whom so much is said in the poems of Boiardo and

Ariosto,--and dedicated it to Cardinal Lewis of Este, then one of the

most distinguished patrons of literature in Italy. It contains a

beautiful allusion to his father's genius as the source of his own

inspiration. It abounds in the supernatural incidents and personified

abstractions characteristic of the romantic school of poetry; and

though Galileo said of it that it reminded him of a picture formed of

inlaid work, rather than of a painting in oil, it has nevertheless a

unity of plot, a sustained interest, and a uniform elevation of style,

which distinguishes it from all the poetry of the period. Our own

Spenser has imbibed the spirit of some of its most beautiful passages;

and several striking coincidences between his _Faerie Queen_ and the

_Rinaldo_ can be traced, particularly in the account of the lion tamed

by Clarillo, and the well-known incident of Una and the lion in

Spenser. The poem of _Rinaldo_ will always be read with interest, as

it strikes the keynote of Tasso's great epic, the _Gerusalemme

Liberata_, many of the finest fictions of which were adopted with very

little modification from the earlier work. His letter asking his

father's permission to publish it came at a very inopportune moment.

Bernardo was smarting just then under the disappointments connected

with the reception of his own poem, the _Amadigi_. It produced little

impression upon the general public; the copies which he distributed

among the Italian nobles procured him nothing but conventional thanks

and polite praise; while the magnificent edition which he prepared

specially for presentation to Philip II. of Spain, in the hope that he

might thereby be induced to interest himself in the restoration of his

wife's property at Naples, was not even acknowledged. Wounded thus in

his deepest sensibilities, and bewailing the misfortunes of his

literary career, we need not wonder that he should have sent a reply

peremptorily commanding his son to give up poetry and stick to the

law. The young poet in his distress sought the intervention of some of

his father's literary friends, and through their mediation the destiny

of Torquato Tasso and of Italian poetry was accomplished, and the poem

of _Rinaldo_ was given to the world through the renowned press of the

Franceschi of Venice. No sooner was it published than it achieved an

extraordinary success, for Cervantes had not yet made this class of

fiction for ever ridiculous.

Notwithstanding that the public were surfeited with romantic poetry,

the merits of this new work, constructed upon different principles and

carried out in an original style, were such that the literary schools

were carried by storm, and the young Tasso, or Tassino, as he was now

called to distinguish him from his father, at once leapt into fame. So

great was his reputation, that the newly-restored University of

Bologna invited him to reside there, so that it might share in the

distinction conferred by his name. In this magnificent seat of

learning he remained, enjoying the advantage of literary intercourse

with the great scholars who then occupied the chairs of the

University, until the publication of some anonymous pasquinades,

reflecting severely upon the leading inhabitants, of which he was

falsely supposed to be the author. In his absence the Government

officials visited his rooms and seized his papers. The sensitive poet

regarded this suspicion as a stain upon his honour, and the outrage he

never forgave. Shaking the dust from his shoes, he departed from

Bologna, and for some time led an unsettled life, enjoying the

generous hospitality of the nobles whose names he had celebrated in

his _Rinaldo_. Returning at length to Padua, where he engaged in the

study of Aristotle and Plato, and delivered three discourses on Heroic

Poetry in the Academia degli Eterei, or the Ethereals--in which he

developed the whole theory of his poetical design--which were

afterwards published, the office of Laureate at the court of Ferrara

was offered to him by Cardinal Lewis of Este, to whom, as I have said,

he had dedicated his _Rinaldo_.

Torquato Tasso was now in the full bloom of opening manhood. He was

distinguished, like his father, for his personal beauty and grace,

with a high, noble forehead, deep gray melancholy eyes, regular

well-cut features, and hair of a light brown. He had the advantage of

all the culture of his time. His manners were refined by familiar

intercourse with the highest nobles of the land, and his mind richly

furnished, not only with the stores of classic literature, but also

with the literary treasures of his own country; while a residence,

more or less prolonged, in the most famous towns, and among the most

romantic scenes of Italy, had widened his mental horizon and expanded

his sympathies. He had already mounted almost to the highest step of

the literary ladder. Nothing could exceed the tokens of respect with

which he was everywhere received. But, in spite of all these

advantages, Tasso was now beginning to realise the shadows that

accompany even the most splendid literary career. His own experience

was now confirming to him the truth of what his father had often

sought to impress upon his mind,--that the favour of princes was

capricious, and that a life of dependence at a court was of all others

the most unsatisfactory. Constitutionally disposed to melancholy,

irritable and sensitive to the last degree, he brooded over the

fancied wrongs and slights which he had received; and at first he was

disposed to accept the advice of his father's friend, the well-known

Sperone, who strongly dissuaded him from going to the court of

Ferrara, painting the nature of the life he would lead there in the

most forbidding colours. It would have been well had he listened to

this wise counsel, strengthened as it was by his own better judgment;

for in that case he might have been spared the mortifications which

made the whole of his after life one continued martyrdom. But

recovering from a protracted illness, into which the agitation of his

spirits threw him, when on a visit to his father at the court of the

Duke of Mantua, he passed from the depths of despondency to the

opposite extreme of eagerness, and, fired by ambition, he resolved to

enter upon the path to distinction which now opened before him. And

here we come to the crisis of his life.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a state of things existed in

Italy somewhat similar to that which existed in the Highlands of

Scotland in earlier times. Each Highland chief maintained an

independent court, and among his personal retainers a bard who should

celebrate his deeds was considered indispensable. So was it with the

princes of Italy. In their train was always found a man of letters

whose poetic Muse was dedicated to laureate duties, and was valued in

proportion as it recorded the triumphs of the protecting court. For

this patronage of art and letters no court was more distinguished than

that of Ferrara.

"Whoe'er in Italy is known to fame,

This lordly home as frequent guest can claim."

The family of Este was the most ancient and illustrious in Italy. The

house of Brunswick, from which our own royal family is descended, was

a shoot from this parent stock. It intermarried with the principal

reigning families of Europe. Leibnitz, Muratori, and our own great

historian, Gibbon, have traced the lineage and chronicled the family

incidents of this ducal house. Lucrezia Borgia and the Parasina of

Byron were members of it. For several generations the men and women

were remarkable for the curious contrasts of a violent character and

the pursuits of the arts of peace which they displayed. Poisonings,

assassinations, adulteries, imprisonments for life, conspiracies, were

by no means uncommon incidents in their tragical history. And yet

under their government Ferrara became the first really modern city in

Europe, with well-built streets, a large population, and flourishing

trade, attracting wealthy settlers from all parts of Italy. Nearly all

the members of the reigning house were distinguished for their

personal attractions and their mental capacities. They were also

notorious for their love of display. We have books, such as the

_Antiquities of the House of Este_ by Muratori, the _Chivalries of

Ferrara_, the _Borseid_, and the _Hecatommiti_ of Giraldi, which were

written almost to order for the purpose of gratifying this vanity.

Borso, the first duke, caused his portrait to be painted in a series

of historical representations in one of his principal palaces;

Hercules I. kept the anniversary of his accession to the throne by a

splendid procession, which was compared to the festival of Corpus

Christi; an Order, which had nothing in common with medieval chivalry,

called the Order of the Golden Spur, was instituted by his court, and

conferred upon those who reflected lustre by their deeds or their

literary gifts upon the house of Este; while, to crown all, we read at

this day on the tower of the cathedral of Ferrara the dedicatory

inscription beginning with "To the god Hercules II.," which the

complaisant inhabitants had put there,--an apotheosis which reminds us

of the worst slavery of imperial Rome under Caligula and Domitian.

Some of the greatest names of Italy, such as Petrarch, Boiardo,

Ariosto, the wonderful prodigy Olympia Morata, and the celebrated

poetess Vittoria Colonna--the friend of Michael Angelo--were connected

with this brilliant court. The well-known French poet Clement Marot

fled to it to escape persecution in his native country. Calvin found a

refuge there for some months under the assumed name of Charles

d'Heppeville, during which he converted the duchess to the reformed

faith. The father of Tasso visited it when it was at the height of its

splendour and renown. Hercules II., the then reigning prince, son of

Lucrezia Borgia, had earned a great reputation for his literary works

and patronage of the fine arts; and his wife, the friend of Calvin,

the youngest daughter of Louis XII. of France, was even more

remarkable for her talents, being equally skilled in the Latin and

Greek languages. This renowned couple drew around them a circle of the

most accomplished men and women in Europe, in whose congenial society

Bernardo Tasso spent a few months of great enjoyment, delighting all

by his wit and social qualities.

But notwithstanding all this magnificence and love of learning, the

house of Este, among its other contradictory qualities, was

distinguished for capriciousness and meanness. Even Muratori, their

ardent panegyrist, does not attempt to conceal this blemish. We must

deduct a good deal from the high-sounding praise which the courtly

writers of Italy bestowed upon this house for its splendid patronage

of literature, when we remember that Ariosto, who passed his life in

its service, was treated with niggardliness and contempt. He had a

place assigned him among the musicians and jugglers, and was regarded

as one of the common domestics of the establishment. Guarini, the

well-known author of the _Pastor Fido_, contemporary with Tasso, met

with much indignity in the service of Alphonso II.; while Panigarola

and several other distinguished men were compelled to leave the

service of the ducal family by persecution. Benvenuto Cellini, who

resided at the court of Ferrara twenty-five years before Tasso, gives

a very unfavourable account of the avarice and rapacity which

characterised it; and Serassi, the biographer of Tasso, remarks that

the court seems to have been extremely dangerous, especially to

literary men. It was not therefore, we may suppose, without other

reasons than his being merely a Guelph, that Dante in his _Inferno_

placed one of the scions of the house in hell, and uniformly regarded

the family with dislike. Tasso himself was destined to experience both

the favour and the hostility, the generosity and the neglect, of this

capricious house.

Ferrara is now a dull sleepy city of less than thirty thousand

inhabitants. It is a place that continues to exist not because of its

vitality, but by the mere force of habit. Its broad deserted streets

and decaying palaces lie silent and sad in the drowsy noon sunshine,

like the aisles of a September forest. But in the days of Tasso it was

one of the gayest cities of Italy, which looked upon itself as the

centre of the world, and all beyond as mere margin. It was always

_festa_, always carnival, in Ferrara; and when the poet came to it in

his twentieth year, on the last day of October 1565, he found it one

brilliant theatre. The reigning duke, Alphonso II., had just been

married to the daughter of Ferdinand I., Emperor of Austria; and this

splendid alliance was celebrated by tournaments, balls, feasts, and

other pageantry, which transcended everything of the kind that had

previously been seen in Italy, with the exception, perhaps, of the

fêtes connected with the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to his

grandfather. The ardent mind of the poet, it need hardly be said, was

completely fascinated. He saw himself surrounded daily with all the

splendours of chivalry, and lived in the midst of scenes such as haunt

the dreams of poets and inspire the pages of romance. Goethe, in his

_Torquato Tasso_, an exquisite poem, it may be said, but wanting in

dramatic action, gives a vivid picture of the poet's life at the court

of Ferrara, which bore some resemblance to his own at the court of

Weimar.

Two sisters of the reigning prince lived in the palace, and by their

beauty and accomplishments imparted to the court an air of great

refinement. The younger, the famous Leonora of Este, was about thirty

years of age at this time, and therefore considerably older than

Tasso. A severe and protracted illness had shut her out from the

festivities connected with her brother's marriage, and communicated to

her mind a touch of sadness, and to her features a spiritual delicacy

which greatly increased her attractiveness. The numerous writers by

whom she is mentioned talk with rapture, not only of her beauty and

genius, but also of her saintly goodness, which was so great that a

single prayer of hers on one occasion was said to have rescued Ferrara

from the wrath of Heaven evinced in the inundation of the Po. In the

society of these ladies Tasso spent a great deal of his time; and

perhaps his intercourse with them, unconstrained by court

conventionalities, was not altogether free from those tender feelings

which the charms of a lovely and accomplished woman, whatever her

rank, might readily excite in a poetic temperament. The author of the

_Sorrows of Werther_ did not, therefore, perhaps draw exclusively upon

his imagination in picturing the rise and struggle of an unhappy

passion for Leonora d'Este in the bosom of the young poet. Whatever

may be said regarding this passion, however, there can be no doubt

that his heart was at this time enslaved by younger and humbler

beauties. He had much of the temperament of his father, who, although

exemplary in his single and married life, was distinguished for his

Platonic gallantry, and cherished a poetic attachment, according to

the fashion of the day, for various ladies throughout his career, such

as Genevra Malatesta, the beautiful Tullia of Arragon, and Marguerite

de Valois, sister of Henry III. These follies were but the froth of

his genius, however; and in this respect his son followed his example.

Lucrezia Bendidio, a young lady at court gifted with singular beauty

and musical talent, reigned for a while supreme over his affections.

But she had other suitors, including the author of the _Pastor Fido_,

and the poet Pigna, who was the secretary and favourite of the

reigning duke. The Princess Leonora tried to cure Tasso of this

passion by persuading him to illustrate the verses of his rival Pigna.

Nothing came of this first love, therefore, and the object of it soon

after married into the house of Machiavelli.

In the congenial atmosphere of the court of Ferrara, surrounded by the

flower of beauty and chivalry, stimulated by the associations of his

master Ariosto, which every object around recalled, and encouraged by

the praises of the sweetest lips in the palace, Tasso set himself

diligently to the composition of the great work of his life, the

_Gerusalemme Liberata_, the plan of which he had formed before he left

the University of Padua. Among the treasures of the Vatican Library I

have seen a sketch in the poet's own handwriting of the first three

cantos. This sketch he now modified and enlarged, and in the space of

a few months completed five entire cantos. He read the poem as it

proceeded to the fair sisters of his patron, and received the benefit

of their criticisms. This work, which is "the great epic poem in the

strict sense of modern times," occupied altogether eighteen years of

the author's life. It was begun in extreme youth, and finished in

middle age, and is a most remarkable example of a young man's devotion

to one absorbing object. The opening chapters were written amid the

bright dreams of youth, and in the happiest circumstances; the closing

ones were composed amid the dark clouds of a morbid melancholy, and

during an imprisonment tyrannical in all its features. Placed side by

side with Homer and Virgil, it may be said with Voltaire that Tasso

was more fortunate than either of these immortals in the choice of his

subject. It was based, not upon tradition, but upon true history. It

appealed not merely to the passions of love and ambition, but to the

deepest feelings of the soul, to faith in the unseen and eternal. To

humanity at large the wars of the Cross must be more interesting than

the wrath of Achilles, and the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre than the

siege of Troy. No theme could be more susceptible of poetic treatment

than the Crusades. They were full of stirring incident, of continually

changing objects and images. The strife took place amid scenes from

which the most familiar stories of our childhood have come, and around

which have gathered the most sacred associations of the heart. And

Tasso's mind was one that was peculiarly adapted to reflect all the

special characteristics of the theme. It was deeply religious in its

tone, and therefore could enter into the struggle with all the

sympathy of real conviction. His luxuriant imagination was chastened

by his classical culture; while the pervading melancholy of his

temperament gave to the scenes which he described an effect such as a

thin veil of mist that comes and goes gives to a mountain landscape.

The gorgeous Oriental world of the palm tree and the camel, seen

through this sad poetic haze, has all the shadows of the deep northern

forests and the tender gloom of the western hills. The rigid outlines

of history fade in it to the indefiniteness of fable, and fact becomes

as flexible as fancy.

The circumstances of the times were also peculiarly favourable for the

composition of such a poem. He was at the proper focal distance to

appreciate the full interest of the Crusades, not too near to be

absorbed in observation and engrossed in the immediate results; not

too far off to lose the sympathy for the religious chivalry which

inspired the Holy War. Earlier, in the intensely prosaic period that

immediately succeeded, the romance of the Crusades was gone; later,

Europe was girding itself for the sterner task of reformation. Before

the time of Tasso, Peter the Hermit would have been deemed a foolish

enthusiast; later, he would have been sent to a lunatic asylum. But

just at the time when Tasso wrote there was much, especially in Italy,

of that spirit which roused and quickened Europe in the eleventh

century, much that appealed to the natural poetry in the human heart.

The recent victory of the Christian forces at the famous battle of

Lepanto checked the spread of Mohammedanism in Eastern Europe, and

turned men's thoughts back into the old channel of the Crusades; so

that Gregory XIII., who ascended the pontifical throne about the time

that Tasso had resumed the writing of his _Gerusalemme_, had actually

planned an expedition to the Holy Land, like that which his

predecessor, Urban II., had sent out. And one of the principal events

which the poet witnessed after his arrival at Ferrara, when the

marriage rejoicings were over, was the departure of the reigning duke

with a company of three hundred gentlemen of his court, arrayed in all

the pomp and splendour of the famous Paladins of the first Crusade, to

assist the Emperor of Austria in repelling an invasion of the Turks

into Hungary. Many of the noble houses of Europe at this time were

extremely anxious to trace their origin to the Crusades; and the

vanity of the house of Este required that Tasso should make the great

hero of his epic--the brave and chivalrous Rinaldo--an ancestor of

their family. The scenes and associations, too, in the midst of which

his daily life was spent, helped him to realise vividly the pageantry

connected with the heroes of his epic.

Thus happy in the choice of a subject, and favoured by the spirit of

the time and the circumstances in which he was placed, Tasso gave

himself up to the composition of his poem with a most absorbing

devotion. Like Virgil, he first sketched out his work in prose, and on

this groundwork elaborated the charms of colouring and harmony which

distinguish the poem. So carefully did he study the military art of

his day that all his battles and contests are scientifically

described, and are in entire accordance with the most rigorous rules

of war; and so thoroughly did he make himself acquainted with the

topography of the Holy Land by the aid of books, that Chateaubriand,

who read the _Gerusalemme_ under the walls of Jerusalem, was struck

with the fidelity of the local descriptions. Tasso occasionally sought

relief from his great task by the composition of sonnets and lyrics,

which were published in the Rime of the Paduan Academy, and

contributed to make him still more popular all over Italy. He also

took part in those literary disputations in public which were

characteristic of the age; and for three days in the Academy of

Ferrara, in the presence of the court, defended against both sexes

fifty "Amorous Conclusions" which he had drawn up--a form of

controversy which seems to have been a relic of the courts or

parliaments of love, very popular in the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries. One of the ladies of the court impugned with success his

twenty-first conclusion "that man loves more intensely and with more

stability than woman;" but whether this success was the result of the

goodness of her cause, and not rather of her own ability or of Tasso's

gallantry, may be left an open question. He afterwards published the

whole series of the "Amorous Conclusions," and dedicated them to

Genevra Malatesta, who now, as an old married woman, was greatly

touched by receiving such a compliment from the son of her former

lover.

Tasso's father was now dying at Ostiglia, a small place on the Po, of

which the Duke of Mantua had made him governor. With talents

unimpaired, at the age of seventy-six, and while preparing a new poem

upon the episode of Floridante in the _Amadigi_, he was seized with

his last illness. His son, full of filial anxiety, hastened to see

him, and found the house in wretched disorder; the servants having

taken advantage of the helplessness of their master to neglect their

duties and steal any valuable property they could lay their hands

upon, so that Tasso had not only to take charge of the household

affairs, but also to defray out of his own scanty resources the

domestic expenditure. After a month's severe struggle his father died

in his arms, to the regret of all Italy, and his remains were interred

with great pomp by the Duke of Mantua in a marble cenotaph in the

principal church of his capital, and were afterwards transferred by

Tasso to the church of St. Paul in Ferrara, where they now lie. Thus

passed away one of the most conspicuous and unfortunate persons of his

age, of whom it has been said that he was "a politician, unlucky in

the choice of his party; a client, unlucky in the choice of his

patrons; and a poet, unlucky in the choice of his theme."

The fatigue and sorrow connected with this bereavement brought on a

severe illness, from which Torquato recovered with a sense of

loneliness and depression which only deepened as the years went on.

From this melancholy he enjoyed, however, a temporary respite by a

visit to Paris. The house of Este by frequent intermarriages was

connected with the French court, in consequence of which they had a

right to use the golden lilies of France in their armorial bearings;

and many of the ecclesiastics of the family held rich benefices in

that country as well as in their own. Cardinal Lewis, the brother of

the reigning duke, resolved to inspect the abbeys that belonged to him

in France, and to strengthen the Roman Catholic cause, which had

received a severe blow from the Reformation; and among the gentlemen

of his train he took with him Tasso, in order to introduce him to his

cousin Charles IX., who himself dabbled in poetry and had a fine

literary taste. From the French monarch the poet obtained a gracious

reception; and by the whole court he was warmly welcomed as one who

had worthily commemorated the gallant deeds of the Paladins of France

at the siege of Jerusalem. For nearly a year he resided in different

parts of France, and notwithstanding the numerous distractions of such

a novel mode of life, he added many admirable stanzas to his great

epic, inspired by the very scenes among which his hero, Godfrey, and

his knights had lived. He left just in time to escape the dreadful

massacre of St. Bartholomew; but he may be said to have suffered

indirectly on account of it. Though treated with distinction by the

French court, his personal wants were left unsupplied, and his patron,

Cardinal Lewis, did not make up for this meanness. Voltaire,

therefore, had reason to indulge in a cynical sneer at the glowing

accounts of his visit given by Italian writers; and Balzac's statement

that Tasso left France in the same suit of clothes that he brought

with him, after having worn it for a year, is not without foundation.

This shabby treatment, however, was part of a wider State policy. The

year of Tasso's residence in France was one of preparation for the

massacre of St. Bartholomew; but in order to avert the suspicions of

the intended victims, the Huguenots were treated with such

extraordinary favour by the authorities that the Pope himself was

incensed, and remonstrated with the King. Tasso, ignorant of the

dreadful secret, spoke candidly and vehemently against the reformed

doctrines and those who professed them. His patron therefore simulated

deep indignation on account of this imprudence; and as the step fell

in both with his personal avarice and his State policy, he broke off

the cordial relations that formerly existed between them.

On the return of Tasso to Ferrara he occupied himself for about two

months with the composition of a pastoral drama called the _Aminta_.

This species of poem, which originated with Theocritus, who

represented the shepherds of Sicily nearly as they were, and was

imitated by Virgil, who idealised the shepherd life, was revived at

the court of Ferrara; and some years before a local poet wrote a

pastoral describing a romantic Arcadia, which was acted at the palace,

and seems to have inspired Tasso with the idea of writing one too. But

all previous pastorals--the _Sacrifizio_ of Beccari, the _Aretusa_ of

Lollio, the _Sfortunato_ of Argenti--were rough and incongruous

medleys compared with the finished production of Tasso, which may be

said to mark an era in the history of dramatic poetry. Although Tasso

himself did not think much of it, and did not take any steps to

publish it, the judgment of his contemporaries and of posterity has

placed it next in point of merit to the _Gerusalemme_; and by Italians

it is especially admired for its graceful elegance of diction. Leigh

Hunt executed a very good translation of it, which he dedicated to

Keats. Its choruses, which are so many "lyrical voices floating in

the air," are very beautiful. It was designed for the theatre, and was

acted with great splendour at the court of Ferrara, and a few years

later at Mantua, when the well-known artist and architect Buontalenti

painted the scenery. This fact, however, shows how primitive was the

state of the theatre at this time; and how the spectators, little

accustomed to histrionic representations, were content to witness

dramas that had no plot or action, and to follow the progress of a

beautiful poem rather than a dramatic development. The _Aminta_ long

retained its popularity as an acted poem in Italy. It was often

represented in open-air theatres, like the ancient Greek plays, in

gardens or in woods, where Nature supplied the scenery, and the

_scalinata_ or stage was only some rising piece of ground. Traces of

one of these sylvan theatres may still be seen in the grounds of the

Villa Madama, on the eastern slopes of Monte Mario near Rome; and one

cannot help thinking that a poem so redolent of the open air, so full

of Nature and still natural life, which Tasso himself called Favola

Boschereccia, or a Sylvan Fable, was better adapted for such a stage

than for the heated air and artificial surroundings of the Italian

theatres. Such a pastoral was in entire keeping with the manners of

the Italian peasants; and the scenes of Arcadia which it represented

might be seen almost everywhere in the beautiful valleys and

chestnut-covered hills of their native land. The exquisite loveliness

of the climate, and the simplicity and indolence of the people, lent

themselves naturally to such ideal dreams. And Tasso in his _Aminta_

only gave expression to the same happy thoughts which the same scenery

and the same people had ages before inspired in the mind of Virgil

when he wrote his Eclogues.

After a few months' quiet sojourn with Lucrezia d'Este, now Duchess of

Urbino, at that court, he was appointed secretary to the Duke of

Ferrara, in room of his rival Pigna, who for this reason became his

mortal enemy, and stirred up against him the persecution which

embittered his whole subsequent life. But standing high, as he did, in

the favour of the duke, he enjoyed for a while a season of calm

repose, during which he finished the great epic poem, which was

eagerly looked for throughout Italy. Anxious to make this cherished

work of his genius as perfect as possible, he unfortunately was

imprudent enough to submit portions of his work to all his learned

friends for their opinion. Besides in this way getting the most

contradictory advices, sacrificing his own independent judgment, and

imposing an unworthy yoke upon his genius, the result was that the

fragments of the poem passed from hand to hand, and so got into the

possession of the printers, who, eager to profit by the public

curiosity, pieced them together, and clandestinely printed them. Even

in this fragmentary form, the cantos that appeared in various cities

of Italy were received with unbounded applause. The author, as may be

imagined, was intensely annoyed at this wrong that had been done to

him, and wrote to the Pope, to the Republic of Genoa, and to all the

Italian princes who had any authority in the case, to put a stop to

the publication of a work which had been circulated without his

sanction, but in vain. Even the first complete edition, which was

issued in 1581, seems to have been without his consent; for the author

complains that he was compelled, by the surreptitious publication of

parts of his poem, to finish the work in haste, and he wished for more

time to elaborate the plot and polish the style. In the later

editions, no less than seven of which appeared the same year, Tasso

seems to have been to some extent consulted; but it may be said that

the great epic was given to the world in the form in which we now have

it, without the author's imprimatur, and without the benefit of his

finishing touches. But in spite of this disadvantage it took the whole

country at once by storm. Two thousand copies were sold in two days.

Throughout literary circles nothing else was spoken of. The exquisite

stanzas, full of the true chivalric spirit, touched a responsive chord

in every Italian bosom. Not only in the academies of the learned was

the poem discussed, not only was it recited before princes amid the

splendours of courts, but priests mused over it in the solitude of the

cloister, and peasants chanted its sonorous strains as they worked in

the fields. Quotations from it, we are told, might be heard from the

gondolier on the Grand Canal of Venice, as he greeted his neighbour in

passing by, and from the brigand on the far heights of the Abruzzi, as

he lay in wait for the unsuspecting traveller; and "a portion of the

Crusader's Litany was a favourite chant of the galley-slaves of

Leghorn, as, chained together, they dragged their weary steps along

the shore."

There is no book which it is easier to find fault with than the

_Gerusalemme_ when estimated by the satiated critical spirit of modern

times, which insists upon brevity, and demands in each line a certain

poetic excellence; especially if the poem is known only through the

medium of a translation, which, however faithful, is but the turning

of the wrong side of a piece of tapestry. We may object to the want of

originality in the leading characters, to the occasional inflated

style, and the conceits and plays upon words now and then introduced,

to the apparently disproportionate influence of love upon the action

of the poem, as Hallam has remarked, giving it an effeminate tone,

and, above all, to the introduction of so much supernatural machinery

in the form of magic and demons; for such supernaturalism is out of

keeping altogether with our vaster knowledge of the universe, and our

more solemn ideas of Him who pervades it. But it is not by an analysis

of particular parts, or a criticism of special peculiarities, that the

_Gerusalemme_ should be judged. It is by its effect as a whole, as a

highly finished work of art. A single campaign of the first

crusade--that of 1099--embraces the whole action of the poem; but the

numerous episodes form each a perfect picture, that, like a flower

floating on a stream, and illumined by a special gleam of sunlight,

does not interrupt the continuous flow of the narrative. In a state of

society characterised by much corruption, the sentiments are uniformly

pure; and in an artificial age, when Nature was regarded as only the

background of human action, the descriptions of the objects of Nature

are wonderfully accurate; and the mind of the poet towards the flowers

and trees, the woods and hills and streams, was in a childlike state,

and had all the freshness and joyousness of childhood. The student is

not to be envied who can read without emotion the enthusiastic

description of the Crusader's first sight of Jerusalem, the touching

pathos of Clorinda's death, and the sublime account of the ruins of

Carthage. It would indeed refresh many a mind, surfeited by the vast

mass of our modern literature, to go back to the green pastures and

still waters of this grand old poem.

Every visitor to Florence knows the venerable monastery of San Marco,

with its hallowed relics of Savonarola, and its beautiful frescoes of

Fra Angelico. In a large apartment of this monastery, which was

formerly the library of the monks, are now held the meetings of the

famous Della Cruscan Academy, instituted in 1582 for the purpose of

purifying the national language. At that time every town of the least

importance in Italy had its academy with some strange fantastic name,

which was an important element in the intellectual life of the people,

and exercised a critical control over the literature of the day. Up to

the year 1814 the Della Cruscans assembled in the Palazzo Riccardi,

the ancient palace of the Medici; but that stately building being

required for Government purposes, the members have since been

accommodated in San Marco, where they have sunk into obscurity, many

of the inhabitants of Florence being altogether ignorant of the

existence of such an institution in their city. I had considerable

difficulty in finding out the locality. The furniture of the

apartment is exceedingly curious, and is meant to indicate the object

of the Academy, which--as its name literally translated, _of the_ bran

or _chaff_, signifies--is to sift the fine flour of the language from

the corrupt bran that has gathered around it. The chairs are made in

imitation of a baker's basket, turned bottom upwards and painted red.

On the wall behind each chair is suspended a shovel, with the name of

its owner painted upon it, along with a group of flowers in allusion

to the famous motto of the Academy, "Il più bel fior ne coglie," "It

plucks the fairest flower." On the table, during my visit, there was a

model of a flour-dressing machine and some meal sacks; while several

printed sheets of a new edition of the Italian Dictionary, which the

members were engaged in publishing at the time, with manuscript

corrections, were scattered about. At present the Academy, besides

doing this important work, occasionally holds public sessions; but it

is an effete institution, that has little more than an archæological

interest. It was very different, however, in the sixteenth century.

Then, in point of numbers and reputation, it was the outstanding

literary academy of Italy, and occupied the commanding position from

which the all-powerful humanists of the previous age had been driven

by the counter reformation. It is chiefly, however, by its attacks

upon Tasso that it is now known to fame.

No sooner was the _Gerusalemme_ published than comparisons began to be

instituted between it and the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto. This

latter poem was then in the zenith of its reputation; it was regarded

as the supreme standard of literary excellence, and it was slavishly

imitated by all the inferior poets of Italy. It was inevitable,

therefore, that the two works should be compared together. But as well

might the _Æneid_ of Virgil be compared with the _Metamorphoses_ of

Ovid. The _Orlando Furioso_ is a romantic poem in the manner of Ovid,

whereas the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is an epic poem in the manner of

Homer and Virgil. No Italian poet previous to Tasso had written an

epic; and Tasso himself distinctly avowed that he had chosen that form

of poetry deliberately; not only as being more congenial to his own

mind, but also that he might avoid following in the steps of Ariosto,

whose work he regarded as, in its own department, incapable of being

excelled, or even equalled. In reply to the generous letter of

Ariosto's nephew, who wrote him a letter of congratulation, he said,

"The crown you would honour me with already adorns the head of the

poet to whom you are related, from whence it would be as easy to

snatch it as to wrest the club from the hand of Hercules. I would no

more receive it from your hand than I would snatch it myself."

But in spite of the altogether different nature of the two poems, and

in spite of the distinct disavowals of Tasso, the critics persisted in

accusing him of the presumption of entering the lists with Ariosto.

And in this idea they were strengthened by the injudicious praises of

Camillo Pellegrini, who in a dialogue entitled _Caraffa_ or _Epic

Poetry_, likened the _Orlando Furioso_ to a palace, the plan of which

is defective, but which contains superb rooms splendidly adorned, and

is therefore very captivating to the simple and ignorant; while the

_Gerusalemme Liberata_ resembles a smaller palace, whose architecture

is perfect, and whose rooms are suitable and elegant without being

gaudy, delighting the true masters of art. This squib was published in

Florence, and at once aroused the hostility of the Della Cruscans.

They were already prejudiced against Tasso on account of his

connection with the court of Ferrara, between which and the court of

Florence there was a bitter rivalry; and that offence was intensified

by the unguarded way in which he spoke of the Florentines as being

under the yoke of the Medici, whom he denounced as tyrants. The

Academy, which at the time enjoyed the patronage of the Grand Duke of

Tuscany, was therefore too glad to seize upon Pellegrini's squib as a

pretext for a vehement attack upon Tasso's epic. Ariosto was dead, had

passed among the immortals, and was therefore beyond all envy; but

here was a _living_ poet, who belonged to a court which had cruelly

treated the daughter of their ruler, Lucrezia de Medici, the first

wife of Alfonso of Ferrara, and was a mere youth, who was guilty of

the sacrilege of seeking to dethrone their favourite. Ariosto had

greatly admired Florence, and celebrated its beauties in one of his

finest poems; and was it to be borne that this young upstart, who had

presumed to speak disparagingly of their city, should be preferred to

him? It would be a useless waste of time to go over in detail the

absurd criticisms by which they attempted to throw ridicule upon the

_Gerusalemme Liberata_. They would have passed into utter oblivion had

not Tasso himself, by condescending to reply to them, given to them an

immortality of shame. Not contented with abusing his poem and himself,

they also attacked his father, asserting that his _Amadigi_ was a most

miserable work, and was pillaged wholesale from the writings of

others, and thus wounded the poet in the most tender part.

By this combination of critical cavils against him, Tasso was thrown

back from the land of poetical vision into a dreary mental wilderness.

The effect upon one of his most sensitive nature, predisposed by

temperament and the vicissitudes of his life to profound melancholy,

was most disastrous. We can trace to this cause the commencement of

those mental disorders which, if they never reached actual insanity,

bordered upon it, and darkened the rest of his life. His overwrought

mind gave way to all kinds of morbid fancies. His body became

enfeebled by the agitation of his mind; and the powerful medicines

which he was prevailed upon to take to cure his troubles only

increased them. Like Rousseau during his sad visit to England, he

became suspicious of every one, and lost faith even in himself.

Religious doubts commenced to agitate his mind. Distracted by this

worst of all evils, he put himself into the hands of the Holy

Fraternity at Bologna; and though the inquisitors had sense enough to

see that what he considered atheistical doubts were only the illusions

of hypochondria, and tried to reassure him as to their belief in the

soundness of his faith, he was not satisfied with the absolution which

they had given to him.

The court of Ferrara was full of unscrupulous intriguers. Tasso's

wonderful success could not be forgiven by some of the petty aspirants

after literary fame who haunted the ducal precincts. Pigna, whose

place as secretary he had usurped, stirred up the jealousy of the

other courtiers into open persecution. Leonardo Salvinati, the leader

of the Della Cruscan Academy, wishing to ingratiate himself with the

court, joined in the hostility. Tasso's papers were stolen, and his

letters intercepted and read, and a false construction was put upon

everything he did. At first the duke refused to hear the various

accusations that were brought against him, and continued to show him

every mark of esteem. He had the privilege, in that ceremonious age a

very high one, of dining daily with the prince at his own private

table. He accompanied the princesses to their country retreats at

Urbino, Belriguarda, or Consandoli, where in healthy country pursuits

he forgot for a time his troubles. At Urbino he wrote the unfinished

canzone to the river Metauro, one of the most touching of his

compositions, in which he laments the wounds which fortune had

inflicted upon him through the whole of his hapless life.

But the tenure of princely favour at Italian courts, amid so many

ambitious patrons and anxious suitors, was very precarious. It was

uncommonly so at Ferrara. After a while a sudden change passed over

the mind of the duke towards Tasso. Whether tired of the poet's

incessant complaints, irritated at his incautious conduct--going the

length on two occasions of drawing his sword, when provoked, upon

members of the ducal household,--or whether his suspicions were

aroused regarding the relations between him and his sister Leonora, is

not known, but from this time he began to treat Tasso as if he were a

madman. He was placed under the charge of the ducal physicians and

servants, who reported to their employer every careless word. Removed

from Belriguarda, he was ordered to be confined in the Ferrarese

convent of San Francisco; and two friars were appointed to watch over

him continually. Such a life was unendurable to the proud poet, who

disliked the nauseous medicines of the convent as much as its

restraint; and taking advantage of a _festa_, when his keepers were

unusually negligent, he made his escape by a window. In the disguise

of a shepherd he travelled on foot over the mountains of the Abruzzi,

getting a morsel of bread and a lodging from the peasants by the way,

to his sister's house at Sorrento, now the Vigna Sersale. There he

remained during the whole summer, soothed by his sister's affectionate

kindness. The monotony of the life, however, began to pall upon him,

and he longed to get back to his old scenes of excitement. Undeterred

by an evasive reply which the duke sent to an urgent letter of his, he

set out for Ferrara; and on his arrival, meeting with a cold

reception, he was obliged again to leave the place where he had once

been so happy. For a year and a half he wandered over almost the whole

of Northern Italy, visiting in turn Venice, Urbino, Mantua, Padua,

Rome, and Turin. At the last place he arrived without a passport, and

in such a miserable condition that the guards at the gates of the city

would not have admitted him had he not been recognised by a Venetian

printer who happened to be present. His startled looks, his nervous

manner, and his perpetual restlessness, confirmed wherever he went the

rumour of his madness; and, even if he were not mad, the object of

Alfonso of Este's anger might be a dangerous associate. During all

this time he was in the greatest poverty, being obliged to sell for

bread the splendid ruby and collar of gold which the Duchess of Urbino

had presented to him when he recited to her at her own court his

pastoral poem of _Aminta_.

From the Duke of Urbino and Prince Charles Emanuel of Savoy, however,

he received generous treatment; but a fatal spell carried him back a

third time to Ferrara. His arrival by an unfortunate coincidence

happened to be on the very day that Margaret Gonzaga, daughter of the

Duke of Mantua, was to come home as the third bride of Alfonso. The

duke, preoccupied with the stately ceremonies connected with his

nuptials, took no notice of him; and many of the courtiers from whom

he expected an affectionate welcome, taking their cue from their

master, turned their backs upon him. What a contrast to his first

reception at that court fourteen years before, when he stood among the

noble spectators of Alfonso's marriage with his first wife, the

Archduchess of Austria, as one of the most honoured of the guests! He

now gazed upon the splendours of this third marriage ceremony, by far

the greatest poet of his age, but a homeless vagrant, a reputed

maniac, treated with neglect or contumely on every side! No wonder

that his cup of misery, which had previously been filled to the brim,

overflowed with this last and crowning insult; and, scarce knowing

what he did, he broke forth into the most vehement denunciations of

the duke and his whole court, declaring that they were all "a gang of

poltroons, ingrates, and scoundrels." These fiery reproaches, which

his misery had wrung from the poor poet, were carried by his enemies

to the ear of the Duke, and Tasso was immediately seized and

imprisoned as a lunatic in the hospital of Santa Anna in Ferrara--in

the same year and the same month, it may be mentioned, in which

another of the great epic poets of the world, Camoens, the author of

the _Lusiad_, finished as a pauper in an hospital his miserable

career.

While madness was alleged as the ostensible reason, the real motives

of this step are involved in as deep a mystery as the cause of Ovid's

banishment to Tomi, on the Euxine. Muratori, the author of the

_Antiquities of the House of Este_, says that he was confined

principally in order that he might be cured; while the Abbate Serassi,

who wrote a life of the poet, attributes his imprisonment to his

insolence to the duke and his court, and to his desire, repeatedly

expressed and acted upon, to leave his patron's service. But both

these writers considered the interests of the house of Este more

sacred than those of truth. The cause generally accepted is Tasso's

supposed attachment to Leonora, the sister of the duke. For a long

time he is said to have cherished this passion in secret, concealing

it even from the object of it, although evidences of it may be found

in some marked form or playful allusion in nearly all his poetical

writings; the episode of Olinda and Sophronia in the _Gerusalemme_,

which he was urged in vain by his friends to withdraw on the ground of

its irrelevancy, being intended to represent his own ill-fated love.

On one occasion, however, in a confiding mood, he told the secret to

one of the courtiers of Ferrara, whom he believed to be his devoted

friend. But what was thus whispered in the closet was proclaimed upon

the house-top; and a duel was the result, in which Tasso, as expert in

the use of the sword as of the pen, put to flight the cowardly traitor

and his two brothers, whom he had brought with him to attack the poet.

This adventure, and the cause of it, reached the ears of the duke,

whose resentment was kindled by the audacity of a poor poet and

dependant of his court in falling in love with a lady of royal birth.

On the strength of this suspicion his papers were seized, and all the

sonnets, madrigals, and canzones that were supposed to give

countenance to it, confiscated. The manuscript of the _Gerusalemme_

itself was retained, and a deaf ear was turned to the poet's

entreaties for its restoration. Gibbon, in his _Antiquities of the

House of Brunswick_, relates that one day at court, when the duke and

his sister Leonora were present, Tasso was so struck with the beauty

of the princess, that, in a transport of passion, he approached and

kissed her before all the assembly; whereupon the duke, gravely

turning to his courtiers, expressed his regret that so great a man

should have been thus suddenly bereft of reason, and made the

circumstance the pretext for shutting him up in the madhouse of St.

Anne. An abortive attempt was made to prove the attachment, about

fifty years ago, by a certain Count Alberti, who published a

manuscript correspondence purporting to be between Tasso and Leonora,

which he discovered in the library of the Falconieri Palace at Rome.

The alleged discovery excited an immense amount of interest in this

country and on the Continent; but ere the edition was completed the

author was accused of having forged the manuscripts in question, and

was condemned to the galleys.

The story of this hapless love is so romantic in itself, and has been

made the theme of so much pathetic poetry, that it would be almost a

pity to destroy by proof any foundation upon which it may rest. And

yet it is difficult to agree with Professor Rosini, who has ably

treated the whole question in a work entitled _Amore de Tasso_, and

has come to the conclusion, after carefully weighing all the evidence,

that this was the rock upon which Tasso's life made shipwreck. On this

theory several circumstances are altogether inexplicable. We may

dismiss at once the famous kiss as certainly a myth. Besides the

disparity of age, the ill-health, severe piety, and exalted rank of

Leonora were formidable barriers in the way of Tasso's contracting a

passion for her; and it is well known that the poet, who could not

have forgotten so soon a devoted love, did not offer a single tribute

of regret to her memory when she died a few years afterwards. It is

also but too certain that Leonora left her supposed lover to languish

in a dungeon without any reply to his pathetic complaints. The force

of gravitation is a mutual thing; and just as the great sun himself

cannot but bend a little in turn to the smallest orb that wheels

around him, so the august Princess of Este could not but have regarded

with womanly interest a devoted admirer, however humble. The poetical

gallantry of the day will account for all Tasso's lyrical effusions in

praise of Leonora. They were in most instances simply the tributes

that were expected from the laureate of a court, especially a laureate

who was accused, with some show of reason, by the courtiers of

Ferrara, of an enthusiastic devotion to women, and of wasting his life

with the day-dreams of love and chivalry.

Regarding the question of his madness, which was, as I have said, the

ostensible cause of his imprisonment, we are left in almost equal

uncertainty. His morbid sensibility, irritated by the treatment which

he received alike from his friends and foes, his repeated complaints

and occasional violences and extravagances of conduct, may have seemed

to a selfish prince to border closely upon mental derangement. But his

whole conduct during his imprisonment, the nature of the numerous

writings which he produced during that dark period, forbid us to

suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates

reason from insanity. From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case

two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of

conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have

merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever

may have been Alfonso's suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of

history's darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant with everlasting

disgrace.

Three objects attract the steps of the modern pilgrim in desolate

grass-grown Ferrara; the house, distinguished by a tablet, in which

Ariosto was born; the ancient castle in the centre of the town, in

whose courtyard Ugo and Parasina, whom Byron has immortalised, were

beheaded; and next door to the chief hotel--the Europa--and beside the

post-office, the huge hospital of St. Anne, in which Tasso was

confined. This last object is by far the most interesting. The sight

of it is not needed to sadden one more than the deserted streets

themselves do. The dungeon, indicated by a long inscription over the

door, is below the ground-floor of the hospital; it is twelve feet

long, nine feet wide, and seven feet high, and the light penetrates

through its grated windows from a small yard. By several authors,

including Goethe, considerable doubts have been expressed regarding

the authenticity of this cell; and certainly the present features of

the place are not confirmatory of the tradition. This doubt, however,

has not prevented relic-hunters--among whom Shelley may be

included--from carrying off in small fragments the whole of the

bedstead that once stood there, as well as cutting off large pieces

from the door which still survives. Lamartine wrote in pencil some

poetical lines upon the wall; and Byron, with his intense realism,

caused himself to be locked for an hour in it, that he might be able

to form some idea of the sufferings which he recorded in his _Lament

of Tasso_.

Less than sixty years ago the insane were treated with the utmost

inhumanity as accursed of God; and the asylums in which they were shut

up were dismal prisons, where the unfortunate inmates were left in a

state of the utmost filth, or were chained and lashed at the caprice

of savage keepers. The madhouse which Hogarth drew will aid us in

forming a conception of an Italian asylum in the sixteenth century,

which was much worse than anything known in our country. The other

inmates of the hospital of St. Anne suffered much doubtless; but they

were really mad, and were therefore unconscious of their misery. But

that alleviation was wanting in the case of Tasso. He was sane and

conscious, and his sanity intensified the horror of his situation,

"enabling him to gauge with fearful accuracy the depths of the abyss

into which he had fallen." One glimpse of him is given to us by

Montaigne, who visited the cell, where it seems the unfortunate inmate

was made a show of to all whom curiosity or pity attracted to the

hospital. "I had even more indignation than compassion when I saw him

at Ferrara in so piteous a state--a living shadow of himself." His

jailer was Agostino Mosti, who, although he was himself a man of

letters, and therefore should have sympathised with Tasso, on the

contrary carried out to the utmost the cruel commands of his prince,

and by his harsh language and unceasing vigilance immensely aggravated

the sufferings of his victim. This inhuman persecution was caused by

Mosti's jealously of Tasso as the rival of his beloved master Ariosto,

to whom at his own cost he had erected a monument in the church of the

Benedictines at Ferrara.

For a whole year Tasso endured all the horrors of the sordid cell in

which he was immured. After a while he was removed to a larger

apartment, in which he could walk about; and permission was granted to

him sometimes to leave the hospital for part of a day. But whatever

alleviations he might thus have occasionally enjoyed, he was for seven

long years a prisoner in the asylum, tantalised by continual

expectations held out to him of approaching release. One person

only--the nephew of his churlish jailer--acted the part of the Good

Samaritan towards him, cheered his solitude, wrote for him, and

transmitted the letters of complaint or entreaty which he addressed to

his friends, and which would otherwise have been suppressed or

forwarded to his relentless enemy. His sufferings increased as the

slow weary months passed on, so that we need not wonder that the last

years of his captivity should sometimes have been overclouded by

visions of a tormenting demon, of flames and frightful noises, with an

apparition of the Virgin and Child sent to comfort him. That he should

have been able to preserve the general balance of his mind at all in

circumstances sufficient to unseat the reason of most men, is a

convincing proof of the stability of his intellect, and his unshaken

trust in the God of the sorrowful. While we think of this protracted

cruelty of the author of his imprisonment, it is some consolation to

know that he met with what we may well call a merited retribution.

Alfonso, as Sir John Hobhouse tells us, in spite of his haughty

splendour, led an unhappy life, and was deserted in the hour of death

by his courtiers, who suffered his body to be interred without even

the ceremonies that were paid to the meanest of his subjects. His last

wishes were neglected; his will was cancelled. He was succeeded by the

descendant of a natural son of Alfonso I., the husband of Lucrezia

Borgia; and he, falling under the displeasure of the Vatican, was

excommunicated; and Ferrara, having been claimed by Pope Clement VIII.

as a vacant fief, passed away for ever from the house of Este.

"The link

Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think

Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn,

Alfonso! How thy ducal pageants shrink

From thee! if in another station born,

Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad'st to mourn."

At no period of his life was the mind of Tasso more active than during

his imprisonment. In the absence of all nourishment from the bright

world of Nature which he loved so passionately, his fancy could grow

and keep itself leafy, like the cress-seed, which germinates and

produces its anti-scorbutic foliage on a bit of flannel moistened with

water, without any contact with soil or sunlight, in the long Arctic

night of the ice-bound ship. With the ravings of madmen ringing in his

ears, he composed some of the most beautiful of his writings, both in

prose and verse. Among the manuscripts of the British Museum are

preserved some of these writings, whose withered vellum pages we turn

over with profound pity, as we think of the sad circumstances in which

they were composed. The most valuable of these is the manuscript of

the _Torrismondo_, in Tasso's own handwriting, and in the original

parchment binding. This work was begun before his imprisonment, and it

was not finished until the year after his liberation; but the greater

part of it was composed in the wretchedness of his cell at Ferrara.

The story upon which it is founded is a very harrowing one, a king of

the Ostrogoths marrying his own sister, mistaking her for a foreign

princess; but it is treated with very inadequate tragic power, and,

like the _Aminta_, displays no real action. Its beauty chiefly

consists in its choral odes on the vanity of all earthly things, which

are exquisitely sad and touching. We hear in them the wild wail of the

poet over his own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of

glory which haloed his life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds

up--"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"--the words appropriately carved upon

his tombstone at St. Onofrio--is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own

dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as

untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words

are changed, the spell is lost, and the way to the heart is missed.

At last the solicitations of the most powerful princes of Italy on

Tasso's behalf overcame the tenacity of Alfonso's will, and the victim

was released; but not till he had become so weak and ill that, if the

imprisonment had continued a little longer, death would inevitably

have opened the door for him. When the order for his liberation had

been obtained, his friends made known to him by slow degrees the glad

tidings, lest a too sudden shock should prove fatal. He was now free

to go wherever he pleased, and to behold the beauties of Nature, which

had been the mirage of his prison dreams; but the elasticity of his

spirits was gone for ever; the bow had been too long bent to recover

its original spring, and the memory of his sufferings haunted him

continually, and cast a dark shadow over everything. He could not

altogether shake off the fear that he was still in Alfonso's power,

and wherever he went he fancied that an officer was in pursuit of him

to drag him back to the foul prison in St. Anne's. A modern Italian

poet, Aleardo Aleardi, has graphically described the feelings of the

gentle poet-knight, roaming, pale and dishevelled, as a mendicant from

door to door. But the sufferings that had thus maimed him bodily and

mentally had spiritually ennobled him; and there is not a more

touching incident in all history than his entreaty to be allowed to

kiss the hand of the cruel tyrant, as a last favour before leaving

Ferrara for ever, in token of his gratitude for the benefits conferred

upon him in happier days,--a favour which Alfonso, to his eternal

disgrace, refused to grant.

At first Tasso took up his abode at the court of the Duke of Mantua,

whose son, Vincenzo Gonzaga, had been the principal instrument in his

release, on the occasion of his marriage with the sister of Alfonso of

Ferrara. This Vincenzo Gonzaga is shown by the light of history in two

opposite characters: as the generous friend and patron of Tasso, and

as the pupil of the Admirable Crichton, who in a midnight brawl slew

his tutor in circumstances of the utmost baseness and treachery. For a

while Tasso was treated with great kindness at Mantua, but, the father

dying, the son no sooner ascended the ducal throne than, with the

capriciousness peculiar to Italian princes, he turned his back upon

the poet whom he had formerly befriended. The incident I have

mentioned would have prepared us for this dastardly conduct; the evil

side of his nature, which was kept in abeyance during his political

pupilage, assuming the predominance on his accession to power. Tasso's

proud spirit could not endure the neglect of his once ardent friend,

and he set out again into the cold inhospitable world, imploring in

his great poverty from a former patron the loan of ten scudi, to pay

the expenses of his journey to Rome. On the way he turned aside to

make a pilgrimage to Loretto, in order to satisfy that earnest

religious feeling which had been the inspiration of his genius, but

the bane of his life. The searching scrutinies and the solemn

acquittals of the inquisitors of Bologna, Ferrara, and the great

tribunal of Rome itself, had not satisfied his morbid mind. And he

thought that he might get that peace of conscience which nothing else

could give by a visit to the Casa Santa--the house of the Virgin Mary

at Loretto. Worn out by the long journey, which he made in the old

fashion on foot, he knelt in prayer before the magnificent shrine; and

thus, admitted as it were within the domestic enclosure of the holy

household, he felt that the Blessed Virgin had given him that calmness

and repose of heart which he had not known since he had prayed as a

boy beside his mother's knee. Strengthened by the successful

accomplishment of his vow, he went on to Rome; but the stern Sixtus

V., who was now upon the Papal throne, was too much occupied with the

architectural reconstruction of Rome, and with the suppression of

brigandage in the Papal States, to bestow any attention upon

literature; and Tasso had lost whatever energy he once possessed to

assert his claims to recognition among the multitude of sycophants at

the Vatican.

Sick at heart, he left the imperial city, and directed his steps to

Naples, in the hope that on the spot he might succeed in recovering

his father's possession and his mother's dowry. But here, too, the

same ill-fortune that had hitherto dogged his steps attended him. The

lawsuit which he instituted, though it promised well at first, proved

a will-o'-the-wisp, which lured him into the bog of absolute penury.

His sister was dead; his mother's relatives, formerly hostile, were

now, because of the lawsuit, doubly embittered against him. In his

distress he sought refuge in the Benedictine monastery of Monte

Oliveto, which is now occupied by the offices of the Municipality of

Naples, and the monastery garden converted into a market-place. Here,

in one of the finest situations in Naples, commanding one of the

loveliest views in the world, and in the congenial society of the

monks, his shattered health was recruited, and his mind tranquillised

by the beauties of Nature and the exercises of religion. He repaid the

kindness of his hosts by writing a poem on the origin of their Order,

and by addressing to them one of his best sonnets. Among the visitors

who sought him out in this retreat was John Battista Manso, Marquis of

Villa, who afterwards became his biographer. This accomplished

nobleman, "whose name the friendship and Latin hexameters of Milton

have rendered at once familiar and musical to English ears," was by

far the kindest and most consistent patron that Tasso ever met with.

He loaded him with presents, and showed him the most delicate and

thoughtful attentions during Tasso's visit at his beautiful villa on

the seashore near Naples. He took him with him to his tower of

Bisaccio, where he remained all October and November, spending his

days, with great advantage to his health, in hunting, and his nights

in music and dancing, taking special delight in the marvellous

performances of the improvisatori. Milton's acquaintance with Manso

may be regarded as one of the most fortunate incidents of his foreign

travels, inasmuch as his conversations about Tasso are supposed to

have suggested to him the design of writing an epic work like the

_Gerusalemme_; and indeed Milton is supposed to have borrowed some of

his ideas for _Paradise Lost_ from the _Sette Giornate, or Seven Days

of Creation_, a fragmentary poem in blank verse, which Tasso began

under the roof of his friend at Naples. This work is now very little

known, but it is worthy of being read, if only for the lofty dignity

of its style, and the beauty of some of its descriptive parts,

particularly the creation of light on the first day, and of the

firmament on the second, and the episode of the Phoenix on the fifth.

Its association with Milton's far grander work, as literary twins laid

for a while in the same cradle, will always invest it with deep

interest to the student.

Tasso occupied himself at the same time with an altered version of his

great poem, which he called the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_. He was

induced to undertake this work in order to triumph over his truculent

critics, the Della Cruscans, who had condemned the former version. In

the Imperial Library at Vienna is preserved the manuscript of this

version, with its numerous alterations and erasures, showing how

laborious the task of remodelling must have been. He suppressed the

touching incident of Olinda and Sophronia. He changed the name of

Rinaldo to Riccardo; and ruthlessly swept his pen through all the

flatteries, direct and indirect, which he had originally bestowed upon

the house of Este. There is hardly a single stanza that is not

changed. But in the process of revision he deprived his poem of all

life. Religious mysticism has been substituted for the refined

chivalry of the Crusades, and poetry and romance have been sacrificed

for classical regularity and religious orthodoxy. To any one familiar

with the original, the _Conquistata_ must be regarded as the most

melancholy book in any language; a sad monument of a noble genius

robbed of its power and depressed by calamity. And it is all the more

melancholy that the author himself was utterly unconscious of its

defects, and got so enamoured of what he considered his improvements,

that he wrote and published a discourse called the _Giudizio_--a cold

pedantic work, in which he explained the principles upon which he made

his alterations. In vain, however, did the author thus commit literary

suicide. His immortal poem had passed beyond the reach of revision,

and stamped itself too deeply upon the minds and hearts of his

countrymen to be effaced by any after version. And now the

_Conquistata_ has sunk into well-merited oblivion, while the

_Liberata_--"his youthful poetical sin," as he himself called it--is

everywhere admired as one of the great classics of the world.

For nine years Tasso lived after his imprisonment. But his free life

was only a little less burdensome than his prison one. With impaired

health and extinguished hope, and only the wreck of his great

intellect, he wandered a homeless pilgrim from court to court, drawn

like a moth to the brilliant flame that had wrought his ruin. Well

would it have been for him had he settled down to some quiet

independent pursuit that would have taken him away from the atmosphere

of court life altogether, such as the Professorship of Poetry and

Ethics which had been offered to him by the Genoese Academy. But the

habits of a whole lifetime could not now be given up. His education

and training had fitted him for no other mode of life. Without the

patronage of the great, literature in those days had not a chance of

success; and a thousand incidents in the life of Tasso serve to show

that "genius was considered the property, not of the individual, but

of his patron"; and with petty meanness was the reward allotted for

this appropriation dealt out. His experience of the favour of princes

at this period was only a repetition of his own earlier one, and that

of his father. His patrons, one after another, got tired of him; and

yet he persisted in soliciting their favour. From the door of his

former friend, Cardinal Gonzaga, at Rome, he was turned away; and as a

fever-stricken mendicant he sought refuge in the Bergamese Hospital of

that city, founded by a relative of his own, who little thought that

it would one day afford an asylum to the most illustrious of his name.

But fate had now discharged its last evil arrow, and began to relent

during the two remaining years of his life. The sun that was all day

obscured, as it struggled with dark clouds, emerged at last, and made

the western sky ablaze with splendour. All over the country nothing

was to be heard but the echoes of Tasso's praises. From the fountains

of the Adige to the Straits of Messina, in the valleys of Savoy, and

in the capitals of Spain and France, his immortal epic was read or

recited by the highest and the lowest. Fortunes were made by its sale.

The famous bandit Sciarra, who with his troop of robbers had terrified

the whole of Southern Italy, hearing that Tasso was at Gaeta, on his

journey from Naples to Rome, sent to compliment him, and offer him,

not only a free passage, but protection by the way. At Florence,

whither he went at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the

whole literary society of the place, even including many of the Della

Cruscans, showered honours upon him. While at Rome Pope Clement VIII.

gave him the most flattering reception, assigned to him an apartment

in the Vatican, and an annual income of two hundred scudi. From the

representatives of his mother's friends at Naples he was also offered

an annuity of two hundred ducats, and a considerable sum in hand, on

condition of stopping the lawsuit. Thus furnished with what he had

vainly looked for all his life, the means of a comfortable

subsistence, his closing days promised a happiness to which he had

hitherto been a stranger. But the gifts of fortune were brought to him

with sad auguries, like the soft sunny smiles of September skies,

which gild the fading leaves with a mockery of May. Tasso came to Rome

in November. But the state of his health was so deplorable that he

could not remain with safety in the room assigned to him in the

Vatican. It was thought, therefore, that the elevated position and

salubrious air, as well as the quiet life of the monastery of St.

Onofrio, not far off on the same side of the Tiber, would be more

suitable for his restoration. Accordingly, Cardinal Cynthio

Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement VIII., who had befriended him on many

occasions, brought him to St. Onofrio in his own carriage. And as his

weary steps crossed the threshold, he said to the monks, who received

him with pitying looks, "I come to die among you."

Whenever he was able to go out, he spent the last days of his life in

the garden of the monastery. There he sat under the shadow of the aged

oak that has since become historical; and as he watched the sunset of

his life, he would gaze upon the mighty ruins and the glorious view

stretching before him with that inspired vision which creates half the

beauty it beholds, and with that enhanced appreciation caused by the

prospect of the coming darkness which would hide it for ever from his

sight. We love to think of the poet in this quiet resting-place, where

the noises of the great world reached him only in subdued murmurs.

Heaven was above him, and the world beneath. The memory of his wrongs

and his ambitions alike vanished in the shadow cast before by his

approaching death. Alfonso and Ferrara faded away upon the horizon of

eternity; even the fame of his _Gerusalemme_, the great object for

which he had lived, had become utterly indifferent to him. In the

monastery of St. Onofrio, a bent, sorrow-stricken man, old before his

time, joining with the monks in the duties of religion, Tasso appeals

more powerfully to our feelings than when in the full flush of youth

and happiness he shone the brightest star in the royal court of

Alfonso.

Awakening to the sense of the great loss that Italy was about to

sustain in his death, his friends and admirers proposed that the Pope

should confer upon him at the Capitol the laurel wreath that had

crowned the brow of Petrarch. But the weather during the winter proved

singularly unpropitious for such a ceremony. Rain fell almost every

day, and constant sirocco winds depressed the spirits of the people

and prevented all outdoor enjoyments. And thus the season wore on till

April dawned with the promise of brighter skies, and the day was

fixed, and all the _élite_ of Rome and of the chief cities of Italy

were invited to attend the coronation. Extensive preparations were

made; the whole city was in a flutter of excitement, and the people

looked forward to a holiday such as Rome had not seen since the days

of the Cæsars. But by this time the poet was dying, fever-wasted, in

his lonely cell. He could see from his window, as he lay propped up

with pillows on his narrow couch, across the river and its broad

valley crowded with houses, the slender campanile of Michael Angelo

ascending from the Capitoline Hill, marking the spot where at the

moment the people were busy preparing for the magnificent ceremony of

the morrow. But not for him was the triumph; it came too late.

"Tomorrow," he said, "I shall be beyond the reach of all earthly

honour." He received the last rites of the Church from the hands of

the diocesan, and passed quietly away with the unfinished sentence

upon his lips, "Into thy hands, O Lord," while the concluding strains

of the vesper hymn were chanted by the monks. And they who came on the

morrow, to summon him to his coronation, found him in the sleep of

death. The laurel wreath that was meant for his brow was laid upon his

coffin, as it was carried on the very day of his intended coronation,

with great pomp, cardinals and princes bearing up the pall, and

deposited in the neighbouring church of the monastery. Ever since, the

anniversary of his death has been religiously kept by the monks of St.

Onofrio. They throw open on that day, the 25th of April, the monastery

and garden to the general public; ladies are freely admitted, and a

festival is observed, during which portions of the poet's writings are

read, his relics exhibited, and his tomb wreathed with flowers.

Tasso died, like Virgil his model, in his fifty-first year. Short and

chequered and full of trouble as was his life, it is amazing what an

immense amount of literary work he accomplished. Since the publication

of his _Rinaldo_, in his seventeenth year, he never ceased writing,

even in the most unfavourable circumstances. Of his prose and poetical

works no less than twenty-five volumes remain to us. These works are

all rich in biographical materials. They show an ideal tenderness of

feeling, an intense love for everything beautiful, and a deep piety,

not only of sentiment but of duty. They are specially interesting to

us as links connecting the ancient world with the modern. We can trace

the influence of Tasso's genius in very varied quarters. He not only

gave a new impulse to the literature of his own country, but even

inspired the artistic productions of the day. The most beautiful

passages of Spenser's _Faerie Queen_ were suggested by his pastoral

poetry; while his chivalrous epic was to Milton at once the incentive

and the model of his own immortal work. It is probable that the _New

Heloïse_ of Rousseau, and the tragedy of _Zaire_ by Voltaire, would

not have been written had not Tasso invested the subject of romantic

love and of the Crusades with such a deep interest to the authors. We

of this age may miss in Tasso's poetical works the dramatic force to

which we are accustomed in such productions; but we acknowledge the

spell which the lyrical element that pervades them all, and towards

which Tasso's genius was most strongly bent, casts over us. His own

personal history strikingly illustrates the vanity of a life spent in

dependence upon princes. But fortunately the lesson is no longer

needed; for a wide and intelligent constituency of readers all over

the world now afford the patronage to literature which was formerly

the special privilege of single individuals favoured by rank or

fortune. Both to authors and readers this emancipation has been

productive of the happiest results.