In literature, also, at the opening of the sixteenth century, we had the historian, Guicciardini; the political writer, Machiavelli; the poet, Ariosto; the cultivated Castiglione: at the end we have the pathetic figure of Torquato Tasso (1544-95), who stands drooping, like a symbol of Italy. Tasso is always inscribed in textbooks as one of the four greatest Italian poets, and it would be useless and impertinent to dispute the concordant testimony of many witnesses. Byron apostrophizes him, "O victor unsurpassed in modern song;" yet one with difficulty avoids thinking that his sad story has added to the beauty of his poetry and heightened his reputation. Torquato Tasso was the last great genius of the Italian Renaissance, and stands there facing the oncoming decadence in gifted helplessness; he had many talents, a noble nature, a melancholy temperament, and a weak character. In boyhood his religious emotions and his intellectual faculties were both over-stimulated. His story is a medley of court favour, success, rivalry, suspicion. His home was Ferrara, but he wandered about, as a sick person seeks to ease his body by changing posture. Early forcing and some natural weakness combined to bring too great a strain upon his mind, which gave way, and the unfortunate man was put in a madhouse by his patron, the Duke of Ferrara. He was confined for seven years, but not ill treated. He died in the monastery of Sant' Onofrio on the Janiculum at Rome, where tourists stop to gaze at the poor remnant of an oak tree, under whose shade he used to sit. Carducci, the great poet, says: "Italy's great literature, the living, national, and at the same time, human literature, with which she reconciled Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and, in a Roman way, represented a renewed Europe, ended with Tasso." His sad story is a fitting epilogue to the Italian Renaissance. This general course of ascent, culmination, and decline holds true even of Venice, except in chronology; for Venice preserved her independence from the normal Italian experience almost as resolutely in the arts as in politics. She produced no literature, piqued perhaps because Italy had taken the Tuscan dialect rather than hers for the national language; but in the arts, after decay had elsewhere set in, she bloomed in the fulness of perfection, as late roses blossom when other bushes show nothing but hips. Of her individual career a few words must be said.