that any fellow-mortal was responsible for his sorrows, or that they were materially aggravated by ill-usage from any quarter. The simple fact is that during the later part of his life Tasso was frequently either insane or on the borderland between sanity and insanity, and that, given his peculiar mental constitution, his double portion of the morbid irritability and sensitiveness commonly incidental to the poetical temperament, the same affliction must have befallen him under any circumstances or in any age of the world. It is indeed possible that his brain was in some measure clouded and warped by the unnatural discipline of the Jesuits into whose hands he fell in his boyhood, and that this determined the nature of some of the symptoms of mental alienation which he afterwards manifested. It was, moreover, his great misfortune that his age should have afforded no other sphere for a delicate and candid mind than a court honeycombed with intrigue and jealousy. Yet the fate of so morbidly sensitive a spirit could hardly have been materially different; it is only wonderful that he should have regained so much of his intellect and died master of himself. Courtly society and religious excitement between them admirably trained his magnificent genius to write the Jerusalem Delivered, in its relation to general culture the epic of the Roman Catholic revival, but, from the large-hearted humanity of the author, happily much more.
The circumstances of Tasso's youth were such as to intensify the innate melancholy of his disposition. His father Bernardo, whom we have met with as a poet and a high-minded cavalier, ruined himself and his family within a few years after Torquato's birth at Sorrento (1544) by the noble imprudence of the advice which he
