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 gave to his Neapolitan patron, and, though afterwards the servant of princes, died in poverty. When twelve years old Tasso lost his mother, poisoned, as was thought, by her relatives, to rob her husband of her portion. We have spoken of the Jesuitry which marred his early education; afterwards, however, he was brought up in a much saner manner. At Urbino, where his father found a temporary refuge, afterwards in busy Venice and at Padua, where he ineffectually studied law, he had become a master of classics, mathematics, and philosophy, and had not only read but annotated Dante. By the time (1565) when he became attached to the court of Ferrara, he had published his _Rinaldo_, in form an imitation of Ariosto, but indicative of a new spirit; and had less fortunately signalised the termination of a two years’ residence at Bologna by a scrape in which he had involved himself by reciting a pasquinade upon the university, which not unnaturally caused him to be accused of having written it. This adventure at least evinced serious deficiency in tact--an endowment more essential than genius in the situation where he now found himself.