had assumed it, on the Capitol. Worn out with illness, Tasso reached Rome in November. The ceremony of his coronation was deferred because Cardinal Aldobrandini had fallen ill. But the pope assigned him a pension; and, under the pressure of pontifical remonstrance, Prince Avellino, who held Tasso's maternal estate, agreed to discharge a portion of his claims by payment of a yearly rent-charge. At no time since Tasso left St Anna had the heavens apparently so smiled upon him. Capitolian honours and money were now at his disposal. Yet fortune came too late. Before the crown was worn or the pensions paid he ascended to the convent of St Onofrio, on a stormy 1st of April in 1595. Seeing a cardinal's coach toil up the steep Trasteverine Hill, the monks came to the door to greet it. From the carriage stepped Tasso, the Odysseus of many wanderings and miseries, the singer of sweetest strains still vocal, and told the prior he was come to die with him.
In St Onofrio he died, on the 25th of April 1595. He was just past fifty-one; and the last twenty years of his existence had been practically and artistically ineffectual. At the age of thirty-one the Gerusalemme, as we have it, was accomplished. The world too was already ringing with the music of Aminta. More than this Tasso had not to give to literature. But those succeeding years of derangement, exile, imprisonment, poverty and hope deferred endear the man to us. Elegiac and querulous as he must always appear, we yet love Tasso better because he suffered through nearly a quarter of a century of slow decline and unexplained misfortune. (J. A. S.)
Taken altogether, the best complete edition of Tasso's writings is that of Rosini (Pisa), in 33 vols. The prose works (in 2 vols., Florence, Le Monnier, 1875) and the letters (in 5 vols., same publisher, 1853) were admirably edited by Cesare Guasti. This edition of Tasso's Letters forms by far the most valuable source for his biography. No student can, however, omit to use the romantic memoir attributed to Tasso's friend, Marchese Manso (printed in Rosini's edition of Tasso's works above cited), and the important Vita di Torquato Tasso by Serassi (Bergamo, 1790). See also Solerti's Life (1895), his editions of the Opere Minori in versi (1891 et seq.), and Gerusalemme (1895), and his bibliography, in the Rivista biblioteche e archivi (1895), on the occasion of the celebration of the tercentenary of Tasso's death.
TASSONI, ALESSANDRO (1565–1635), Italian poet, was a native of Modena, where he was born and died. From 1599 till 1608 he was secretary to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, and in this capacity saw some diplomatic service; he was afterwards employed for some time in similar occupations by Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy. His best-known literary work is a burlesque epic entitled La Secchia Rapita, or “The Rape of the Bucket” (1622), the reference being to a raid of the Modenese upon the people of Bologna in 1325, when a bucket was carried off as a trophy. As in Butler's Hudibras, many of the personal and local allusions in this poem are now very obscure, and are apt to seem somewhat pointless to the general reader, but, in spite of Voltaire's contempt, it cannot be neglected by any systematic student of Italian literature (see Carducci's edition, 1861). Other characteristic works of Tassoni are his Pensieri Diversi (1612), in which he treats philosophical, literary, historical and scientific questions with unusual freedom, and his Considerazioni sopra il Petrarcha (1609), a piece of criticism showing great independence of traditional views.
TASTE (from Lat. taxare, to touch sharply; tangere, to touch), in physiology, the sensation referred to the mouth when certain soluble substances are brought into contact with the mucous membrane of that cavity. By analogy, the word "taste" is used also of aesthetic appreciation (see Aesthetics) and a sense of beauty—commonly with the qualifications "good taste" and "bad taste."
The physiological sense is located almost entirely in the tongue. Three distinct sensations are referable to the tongue—(1) taste, (2) touch, and (3) temperature. The posterior part of its surface, where there is a Λ-shaped group of large papillae, called cir cum val late papillae, supplied by the glosso-pharyngeal nerve, and the tip and margins of the tongue, covered with filiform (touch) papillae and fungi form papillae, are the chief localities where taste is manifested, but it also exists in the glosso-palatine arch and the lateral part of the soft palate. The middle of the tongue and the surface of the hard palate are devoid of taste. The terminal organs of taste consist of peculiar bodies named taste-bulbs or taste-goblets, discovered by Schwalbe and S. L. Lovèn in 1867. They can be most easily demonstrated in the papillae foliatae, large oval prominences found on each side near the base of the tongue in the rabbit. Each papilla consists of a series of laminae or folds, in the sides of which the taste-bodies are readily displayed in a transverse section. Taste-bodies are also found on the lateral aspects of the circumvallate papillae (see Fig. 1), in the fungiform papillae,
Fig. 1.—Transverse section of a circumvallate papilla: W, the papilla; v, v, the wall in section; R, R, the circular slit or fossa; K, K, the taste-bulbs in position; N, N, the nerves.
in the papillae of the soft palate and uvula, the under surface of the epiglottis, the upper part of the posterior surface of the epiglottis, the inner sides of the arytenoid cartilages, and even in the vocal cords.
The taste-bulbs are minute oval bodies, somewhat like an old-fashioned Florence flask, about 1300 inch in length by 1800 in breadth. Each consists of two sets of cells—an outer set, nucleated, fusiform, bent like the staves of a barrel, and arranged side by side so as to leave a small Opening at the apex (the mouth of the barrel), called the gustatory pore; and an inner set, five to ten in number lying in the centre, pointed at the end next the gustatory pore, and branched at the other extremity. The branched ends are continuous with non-medullated nerve fibres from the gustatory nerve. These taste bodies are found in immense numbers: as many as 1760 have been counted on one circumvallate papilla in the ox. The proofs that these are the terminal organs of taste rest on careful observations which have shown (1) that taste is only experienced when the sapid substance is allowed to come into contact with the taste-body, and that the sense
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| Fig. 2. | Fig. 3. |
| Fig. 2.—Isolated taste-bulb: D, supporting or protective cells; K, under end; E, free end, open, with the projecting apices of the taste-cells. | |
| Fig. 3.—d, Isolated protective cell; e, taste-cell. | |
is absent or much weakened in those areas of mucous membrane where these are deficient; (2) that they are most abundant where the sense is most acute; and (3) that section of the glosso-pharyngeal nerve which is known to be distributed to the areas of mucous membrane where taste is present is followed by degeneration of the taste-bodies. At the same time it cannot be asserted that they are absolutely essential to taste, as we can hardly suppose that those animals which have no special taste-bodies are devoid of the sense. Evidence is accumulating that taste depends on nervous impulses excited by chemical change. Substances that have taste must be soluble. Chemical changes are in all probability set up in the taste-cells, or in the processes connected with them. Some progress has been made in the attempt to establish a
