If ever man was born a poet, it might be said so of Tasso; while his whole manner of life, not less than its remarkable vicissitudes, exemplified the poetic character, as it has been idealised in our minds from infancy, by the impressions left upon them, both from fabling traditions and authentic records, concerning these privileged, but on the whole (perhaps) unhappy, beings. The price of greatness must be paid, in labour or suffering, by every man who would distinguish himself in any way above his fellow-creatures; and the poet (_no_ more, it may be, though apparently _much_ more, than the prince, the warrior, the statesman, or the philosopher,) must endure hardships, mental and personal, in proportion to his enjoyments, and be humbled in the same degree that he is exalted above the common lot. Among any ten names, which might be mentioned as having secured an imperishable pre-eminence beyond the probability of revolution, in the same walk of polite literature, Tasso's undoubtedly would be one. At what an expense it was acquired, we proceed to show in a train of events, almost as romantic, and a thousand times more touching, than any thing in his own diversified fictions. He was a poet in every thing and at all times, from infancy (if we may believe his biographers) till he died in extreme old age (if we measure his life by his own testimony above quoted), in his fifty-second year! Smiles and tears, rapture and agony, hope and despondency, a palace and a dungeon, were the alternations frequently crossing in the course of one who was the companion of princes, the delight of ladies, the admiration of the world,--an outcast, a wanderer, clothed in rags and asking bread, or the lonely tenant of a maniac's cell. Such was he, and such were the changes of his state. Torquato was the son of Bernardo Tasso, himself a poet of first rank in his generation, and who has left works, both in prose and verse, to which posterity is yet willing to give honour; but which suffer more eclipse by proximity to the surpassing splendour of his son's, than might have been their lot had he appeared by himself, the single one of his race, who had proved how hard, and yet how possible, it is to climb "The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar."