Among these, in the composition of which it might be questioned whether he was wasting his genius or cultivating it, he produced something more excellent, in the form of a pastoral drama. Accordingly, the most beautiful offspring of his imagination--so far as refers to exquisite grace of diction, and consummate skill in adorning a subject altogether artificial, and feigning a state of society that never did, never could, never ought to exist,--in a story not very natural though the incidents are few, nor very happily connected or intelligibly developed,--his "Aminta" appeared, written in flowing verse of various measures without rhyme, and enriched with lyric chorusses of extraordinary elegance. How the public exhibition of such a drama could be tolerated, before the most exalted personages of the state, ladies of the highest character, and religionists of the most plausible professions, is very difficult for us, in our cold climate, and with our severer as well as juster sentiments of decorum, to imagine. All that can be said in extenuation of the audience, and perhaps of the poet, comes to this presumption, that, though the piece abounds with descriptions and allusions the most voluptuous and fascinating to awaken the most perilous passions in youth, and which no gravity of age ought to endure, such were the manners of the day, and so little of evil was apprehended, where the serpent, that allured Eve with his wiles of beauty among the flowers of paradise, put on this pastoral disguise of the innocence of the golden age, that the fair and the virtuous alike imagined themselves as guiltless in listening to his blandishments, as Milton represents the mother of mankind to have been unsuspicious of danger, when she followed the tempter to the forbidden tree, and entered into a parley with him there, till at length, beguiled by his subtilty, "she plucked, she ate." And here a subject too delicate to be handled on the present occasion must be left to every one's conscience who indulges in the luxury of such reading as the work under consideration furnishes. It is remarkable that the author, designating himself under the name of _Tirsi_, seems to have been forewarned of the malady which soon afterwards overwhelmed him, and to which, no doubt, from constitutional temperament he had been prone from his youth upward, and which, in premature old age, cast such clouds of mystery over the gloom and splendour of his latter life. "Knowest thou not what _Tirsi_ wrote, when, fired with frenzy, he wandered through the forest, at once moving laughter and pity among the lovely nymphs and shepherds? Nor _wrote_ he even then 'things worthy to be laughed at, although he _did_ such things.'" The duchess of Urbino being absent from Ferrara, when Tasso's muse, like Habington's "halcyon," produced "The happy miracle of this rare birth,"