From this period Italian literature, though still interesting in itself, becomes comparatively unimportant in its relation to general civilisation; it drops from the first place into the third, and every year widens the interval between the retrogressive and the progressive peoples. The results of eighty years of oppression are thus stated by an illustrious visitor on the authority of the Italians themselves: “I have sate among their learned men,” says Milton, “and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while they themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought, that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian.” These, it will be observed, are not Milton’s own words, but report the views of the cultivated Italians with whom he associated, and who, enslaved but not subdued, still nurtured hopes which our times have seen fulfilled. Could the foreigner have been excluded, could men like these have been left to settle by themselves with priest and prince, it is probable that the anti-Renaissance reaction and the counter-Reformation would never have come to pass. Yet Italy cannot be wholly excused; the foreigner had brought the mischief, but who had brought the foreigner? This age of decadence is nevertheless represented to posterity by one of the greatest poets of Italy; nor can his misfortunes be specially charged upon it. The sad story of TORQUATO TASSO has ever excited and ever must excite the deepest compassion; but it is not now believed 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