passing, as a Christian to the new order which was emerging.  His position as a courtier, when the Augustan civility of the earlier Medici was being superseded by dynastic absolutism, complicated his difficulties.  While accepting service in the modern spirit of subjection, he dreamed of masters who should be Maecenases, and fondly imagined that poets might still live, like Petrarch, on terms of equality with princes.

We therefore see in Tasso one who obeyed influences to which his real self never wholly or consciously submitted.  He was not so much out of harmony with his age as the incarnation of its still unharmonized contradictions.  The pietism instilled into his mind at Naples; the theories of art imbibed at Padua and Venice; the classical lumber absorbed during his precocious course of academical studies; the hypocritical employment of allegory to render sensuous poetry decorous; the deference to critical opinion and the dictates of literary lawgivers; the reverence for priests and princes interposed between the soul and God:  these were principles which Tasso accepted without having properly assimilated and incorporated their substance into his spiritual being.  What the poet in him really was, we perceive when he wrote, to use Dante’s words, as Love dictates; or as Plato said, when he submitted to the mania of the Muse; or as Horace counseled, when he indulged his genius.  It is in the Aminta, in the episodes of the Gerusalemme, in a small percentage of the Rime, that we find the true Tasso.  For the rest, he had not the advantages enjoyed by Boiardo and Ariosto in a less self-conscious age, of yielding to natural impulse after a full and sympathetic study of classical and mediaeval sources.  The analytical labors of the previous century hampered his creativeness.  He brought to his task preoccupations of divers and self-contradictory pedantries—­pedantries of Catholicism, pedantries of scholasticism, pedantries of humanism in its exhausted phase, pedantries of criticism refined and subtilized within a narrow range of problems.  He had, moreover, weighing on his native genius the fears which brooded like feverish exhalations over the evil days in which he lived—­fears of Church-censure, fears of despotic princes, fears of the Inquisition, fears of hell, fears of the judgment of academies, fears of social custom and courtly conventionalities.  Neither as poet nor as man had he the courage of originality.  What he lacked was character.  He obeyed the spirit of his age, in so far as he did not, like young David, decline Saul’s armor and enter into combat with Philistinism, wielding his sling and stone of native force alone.  Yet that native force was so vigorous that, in spite of the panoply of prejudice he wore, in spite of the cumbrous armor lent him by authority, he moved at times with superb freedom.  In those rare intervals of personal inspiration he dictated the love-tales of Erminia and Armida, the death-scene