tend to enervate; yet the fidelity, the devotion, and purity of sentiment, exhibited in the actions of the chief personages, certainly do not lay it open to excessive censure. Guarini retorted by a witty reply, which the respect paid to the cardinal by the historians, has not permitted to be transmitted to us. 71. This was the last public service of Guarini. A few 1608. years after he was invited to be present at the nuptials Etat. of Francesco Gonzaga and Marguerite of Savoy, during which a comedy of his was represented with great splendour. Chiabrera wrote the interludes, and the architect Viamini arranged the scenery and decorations. The last years of his life were taken up by the lawsuits, which so strangely chequered his career. He hired a lodging at Venice, where many of his causes were decided, as near as possible to the courts, and frequently visited that city to attend the proceedings; and he made a last journey to Rome at the time that two suits were decided in his favour. On his return to Venice he was seized by a fever, of which he died, after an illness of seventeen days, on the 7th of October, 1612, at the age of seventy-five. 96 TORQUATO TASSO. 1544-1595. "Tu che ne vai in Pindo, Ivi pende mia cetra ad un cipresso, Ch' io son dagl' anni e da fortuna oppresso." "Thou, who to Pindus tak'st thy way, Where hangs my harp upon the cypress tree, I am bow'd down with years and misery." THESE few lines, which, in the simple and beautiful original, show what a burthen of thought and power of feeling may be compressed within the smallest compass that language will allow, were written by Torquato Tasso, during his second confinement as a lunatic in the hospital of St. Anne, at Ferrara, by the duke of Alfonso, his patron and his oppressor. They were written when all Europe was listening to the voice of his song, but heard not that of his complaint; in the meridian of his glory as a poet, and in the depth of his humiliation as a man. A spectacle more deplorable and repulsive could hardly be presented to the eye of humanity; nor a fame more enviable and attractive be contemplated by young spirits of finer mould,” to tempt them to hazard all perils of such suffering for the acquisition of such renown. This fragment-a specimen of thousands of fancies, no doubt, equally exquisite and affecting, which were continually passing through the darkened chamber of his mind, more dreary than the gloom of his prison-house-has been quoted at the com mencement of this memoir, as letting the reader at once into the whole mystery of the poet's life, by a single flash of his genius affording a glance at his afflictions. What these were, a long and melancholy tale must unfold what their effect was may be painfully conceived, when we recollect that he was scarcely turned upon forty, 66 the time that he sends the message to his forlorn harp in the woods of Pindus, that he is 'oppressed with years and ill fortune,"—" dagl' anni e da fortuna oppresso." If ever man was born a poet, it might be said so of Tasso; while his whole manner of life, not less than its remarkable vicissitudes, exemplified the poetic character, as it has been idealised in our minds from infancy, by the impressions left upon them, both from fabling traditions and authentic records, concerning these privileged, but on the whole (perhaps) unhappy, beings. The price of greatness must be paid, in labour or suffering, by every man who would distinguish himself in any way above his fellow-creatures; and the poet (no more, it may be, though apparently much more, than the prince, the warrior, the statesman, or the philosopher,) must endure hardships, mental and personal, in proportion to his enjoyments, and be humbled in the same degree that he is exalted above the common lot. Among any ten names, which might be mentioned as having secured an imperishable pre-eminence beyond the probability of revolution, in the same walk of polite literature, Tasso's undoubtedly would be one. At what an expense it was acquired, we proceed to show in a train of events, almost as romantic, and a thousand times more touching, than any thing in his own diversified fictions. He was a poet in every thing and at all times, from infancy (if we may believe his biographers) till he died in extreme old age (if we measure his life by his own testimony above quoted), in his fifty-second year! Smiles and tears, rapture and agony, hope and despondency, a palace and a dungeon, were the alternations frequently crossing in the course of one who was the companion of princes, the delight of ladies, the admiration of the world, — an outcast, a wanderer, clothed in rags and asking bread, or the lonely tenant of a maniac's cell. Such was he, and such were the changes of his state. Torquato was the son of Bernardo Tasso, himself a poet of first rank in his generation, and who has left works, both in prose and verse, to which posterity is yet willing to give honour; but which suffer more eclipse by proximity to the surpassing splendour of his son's, than might have been their lot had he appeared by himself, the single one of his race, who had proved how hard, and yet how possible, it is to climb "The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar." Bernardo was the descendant of an honourable line of ancestors,- -one of whom, nearly two centuries before him, had been a benefactor to the public, by first introducing the method of epistolary intercourse through the medium of posts; and, leaving to his children the reputation which he had acquired in the conduct of these, they became his successors, not only in establishments for that purpose in their own country, but some of them in lands beyond the Alps. It is said that noble alliances were formed by various branches of the Tasso family, in Spain and in Flanders, while others became sovereign princes in Germany, that menagerie for potentates of all genera and species, from the two-headed eagle of Austria to the wren of ****. It would be invidious to set down one out of a hundred who might contend for the honour of filling up the blank, as the least of the little among the great. But, whatever were the hereditary glories of a name,-drawn like a golden chain out of the darkness of the past, and connected, as that of the obscurest peasant in a civilised country may be presumed to have been, with all the varieties of rank, all the gradations of intellect, and all the changes of good and evil fortune, of all the links which formed that chain, those of Bernardo and Torquato were and have remained the most illustrious, though the consecutive or collateral series has been continued to the present day, when the representatives are still found at Bergamo. Bernardo, who was born in 1493, being left an orphan in early youth, with two dependent sisters to provide for out of a very slender patrimony, was com pelled to quarter himself on the patronage of sundry princes and prelates, who, according to the fashion of the times some from parade, and others from attach ment to the noble arts, and letters in their train. kept, not only to adorn pomp, but were employed as secretaries and counsellors, as well as occasionally entrusted with important embassies, which, both in war and peace, were frequent between the commonwealths and principalities into which Italy was divided, and by whose conflicting interests, or under the malignant influence of whose petty intrigues (the rank growth of such a state of society), it was continually more or less distracted. Bernardo was, therefore, from the pressure of circumstances, a restless and homeless man through the principal part of his life, serving the great without serving himself, for precarious bread; and at once pursuing fortune and fame, in the vain hope of being at length- and at length and at length rewarded for his fidelity to his masters with the former, and leaving an inheritance of the latter, which should as much exalt his family by distinction in literature, as others had aggrandised it by the acquirement of riches and alliances with rank, at home and abroad. loved to have men of genius Many of these, indeed, were their courts and swell their At the age of forty-one, after a youth of liberal study, sanguine anticipation, and cherished but ill-directed love for a lady of great beauty and no less celebrity, having been praised by Ariosto in the unsuccessful pursuit of which he compensated himself and delighted his countrymen with the blandishments of poetry, - he was at length appointed secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno. Him Bernardo accompanied through many strange vicissitudes of prosperity and misfortune, in the court and in the battle-field; till, at the end of a few years, he shared so grievously, yet so magnanimously, in the ruin of his patron, that, the latter being involved in a conspiracy against the viceregal government of Naples, and compelled to flee int |