“Colla penna e colla spada
  Nessun val quanto Torquato.”

  For the sword as well as pen
  Tasso is the man of men.

He was a little eater, but not averse to wine, particularly such as combined piquancy with sweetness; and he always dressed in black.  Manso’s account is still more particular, and yet it does not tell all; for Tasso himself informs us that he stammered, and was near-sighted;[33] and a Neapolitan writer who knew him adds to the near-sightedness some visible defect in the eyes.[34] I should doubt, from what Tasso says in his letters, whether he was fond of speaking in public, notwithstanding his debut in that line with the Fifty Amorous Conclusions.Nor does he appear to have been remarkable for his conversation.  Manso has left a collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings—­a suspicious amount, and unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of them is traceable to some other man.  They come from the Greek and Latin philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus.  The two following have the greatest appearance of being genuine: 

A Greek, complaining that he had spoken ill of his country, and maintaining that all the virtues in the world had issued out of it, the poet assented; with the addition, that they had not left one behind them.

A foolish young fellow, garnished with a number of golden chains, coming into a room where he was, and being overheard by him exclaiming, “Is this the great man that was mad?” Tasso said, “Yes; but that people had never put on him more than one chain at a time.”

His character may be gathered, but not perhaps entirely, from what has been written of his life; for some of his earlier letters shew him to have been not quite so grave and refined in his way of talking as readers of the Jerusalem might suppose.  He was probably at that time of life not so scrupulous in his morals as he professed to be during the greater part of it.  His mother is thought to have died of chagrin and impatience at being separated so long from her husband, and not knowing what to do to save her dowry from her brothers; and I take her son to have combined his mother’s ultra-sensitive organisation with his father’s worldly imprudence and unequal spirits.  The addition of the nervous temperament of one parent to the aspiring nature of the other gave rise to the poet’s trembling eagerness for distinction; and Torquato’s very love for them both hindered him from seeing what should have been corrected in the infirmities which he inherited.  Falling from the highest hopes of prosperity into the most painful afflictions, he thus wanted solid principles of action to support him, and was forced to retreat upon an excess of self-esteem, which allowed his pride to become a beggar, and his naturally kind, loving, just, and heroical disposition to condescend to almost every species of inconsistency.  The Duke of Ferrara, he complains, did not believe a word he said;[35]