with the applause of contemporaries but the ridicule of posterity; to the whole nation ease without dignity and facilities for sinking tranquilly into corruption; then no period of her history was so felicitous for Italy as the 140 years which followed the peace of Cateau-Cambresis.  Invasions ceased:  her foreign lord saved Italy from intermeddling rivals.  Internal struggles ceased:  her foreign lord removed their causes and curbed national ambitions.  Popular revolutions ceased:  her foreign lord bitted and bridled the population of her provinces.  Of bravi, highwaymen, vulgar acts of vengeance, tragedies among nobles and princes, we find indeed abundance; but these affected the mass of the people to no serious extent.  The Italians enjoyed life, indulged in the sweets of leisure, the sweets of vice, the sweets of making love and dangling after women.  From the camp and the council-chamber, where they had formerly been bred, the nobles passed into petty courts and moldered in a multitude of little capitals.  Men bearing historic names, insensible of their own degradation, bowed the neck gladly, groveled in beatitude.  Deprived of power, they consoled themselves with privileges, patented favors, impertinences vented on the common people.  The princes amused themselves by debasing the old aristocracy to the mire, depreciating their honors by the creations of new titles, multiplying frivolous concessions, adding class to class of idle and servile dependents on their personal bounty.  In one word, the paradise of mediocrities came into being.’

Tasso was born before the beginning of this epoch.  But he lived into the last decade of the sixteenth century.  In every fiber of his character he felt the influences of Italian decadence, even while he reacted against them.  His misfortunes resulted in great measure from his not having wholly discarded the traditions of the Renaissance, though his temperament and acquired habits made him in many points sympathetic to the Counter-Reformation.  At the same time, he was not a mediocrity, but the last of an illustrious race of nobly gifted men of genius.  Therefore he never patiently submitted to the humiliating conditions which his own conception of the Court, the Prince, the Church, and the Italian gentleman logically involved at that period.  He could not be contented with the paradise of mediocrities described by Balbi.  Yet he had not strength to live outside its pale.  It was the pathos of his situation that he persisted in idealizing this paradise, and expected to find in it a paradise of exceptional natures.  This it could not be.  No one turns Circe’s pigsty into a Parnassus.  If Tasso had possessed force of character enough to rend the trammels of convention and to live his own life in a self-constructed sphere, he might still have been unfortunate.  Nature condemned him to suffering.  But from the study of his history we then had risen invigorated by the contemplation of heroism, instead of quitting it, as now we do, with pity, but with pity tempered by a slight contempt.