of his suffering into the veins of humanity; as Heine, motionless upon his mattress grave.  These more potent personalities, bequeathing to the world examples of endurance, have won the wreath of never-blasted bays which shall not be set on Tasso’s forehead.  We crown him with frailer leaves, bedewed with tears tender as his own sentiment, and aureoled with the light that emanates from pure and delicate creations of his fancy.

Though Tasso does not command admiration by heroism, he wins compassion as a beautiful and finely-gifted nature inadequate to cope with the conditions of his century.  For a poet to be independent in that age of intellectual servitude was well-nigh impossible.  To be light-hearted and ironically indifferent lay not in Tasso’s temperament.  It was no less difficult for a man of his mental education to maintain the balance between orthodoxy and speculation, faith and reason, classical culture and Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.  He belonged in one sense too much, and in another sense too little, to his epoch.  One eminent critic calls him the only Christian of the Italian Renaissance, another with equal justice treats him as the humanistic poet of the Catholic Revival.[83]

Properly speaking, he was the genius of that transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, on which I dwelt in the second chapter of this work.  By natural inclination he belonged to the line of artists which began with Boccaccio and culminated in Ariosto.  But his training and the bias of the times in which he lived, made him break with Boccaccio’s tradition.  He tried to be the poet of the Council of Trent, without having assimilated hypocrisy or acquired false taste, without comprehending the essentially prosaic and worldly nature of that religious revolution.  He therefore lived and worked in a continual discord.  This may not suffice to account for the unhingement of his reason.  I prefer to explain that by the fatigue of intellectual labor and worry acting on a brain predisposed for melancholia and overtasked from infancy.  But it does account for the moral martyrdom he suffered, and the internal perplexity to which he was habitually subject.

[Footnote 83:  Carducci, in his essay Dello Svolgimento della Letteratura Nazionale, and Quinet, in his Revolutions d’ltalie.]

When Tasso first saw the light, the Italians had rejected the Reformation and consented to stifle free thought.  The culture of the Renaissance had been condemned; the Spanish hegemony had been accepted.  Of this new attitude the concordat between Charles and Clement, the Tridentine Council, the Inquisition and the Company of Jesus were external signs.  But these potent agencies had not accomplished their work in Tasso’s lifetime.  He was rent in twain because he could not react against them as Bruno did, and could not identify himself with them as Loyola was doing.  As an artist he belonged to the old order which was