and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Sarpi survived the stylus of the Roman Curia with calm inscrutability at S. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch-tower behind Bello Sguardo.  With Michelangelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto in 1594, the godlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation’s prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions?  The list is but a poor one.  Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarroti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature.  The Bolognese Academy in painting.  After these men expand arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento—­barocco architecture, false taste, frivolity, grimace, affectation—­Jesuitry translated into culture.  On one bright point, indeed, the eye rests with hope and comfort.  Palestrina, when he died in 1594, did not close but opened an age for music.  His posterity, those composers, lutists, violists and singers, from whom the modern art of arts has drawn her being, down to the sweet fellowship of Pergolese, Marcello and Jomelli, of Guarneri, Amati and Stradivari, of Farinelli, Caffarielli and La Romanina, were as yet but rising dimly heralded with light of dawn upon their foreheads.

In making the transition from the Gerusalemme to the Adone, from the last great poem of the Cinque Cento to the epic of the Sei Cento, it is indispensable that notice should be taken of the Pastor Fido and its author.  Giambattista Guarini forms a link between Vasso and the poets of the seventeenth century.  He belonged less to the Renaissance, more to the culture of the age created by the Council of Trent, than did Tasso.  His life, in many of its details similar, in others most dissimilar, to that of Tasso, illustrates and helps us in some measure to explain the latter.  It must therefore form the subject of a somewhat detailed study.

Guarini drew his blood on the paternal side from the illustrious humanist Guarino of Verona, who settled at Ferrara in the fifteenth century as tutor to Leonello d’Este.[176] By his mother he claimed descent from the Florentine house of Machiavelli.  Born in 1537, he was seven years older than Torquato Tasso, whom he survived eighteen years, not closing his long life until 1612.  He received a solid education both at Pisa and Padua, and was called at the early age of eighteen to profess moral philosophy in the University of Ferrara.  Being of noble birth and inheriting a considerable patrimony, Guarini might have enjoyed a life of uninterrupted literary leisure, if he had chosen to forego empty honors and shun the idle distractions of Courts.  But it was the fate of distinguished men in that age to plunge into those quicksands.  Guarini had a character and intellect suited to the conduct of state affairs; and he shared the delusion prevalent among his contemporaries, that the petty Italian principalities could offer a field for the exercise of these talents.  ’If our