by whose orders he was afterwards committed to the hospital for lunatics, where he was closely confined, and treated with extreme rigor. If he had never been insane before, he certainly now became so. To add to his misfortune, his poem was printed without his permission, from an imperfect copy, and while editors and printers enriched themselves with the fruit of his labors, the poet himself was languishing in a dungeon, despised, neglected, sick, and destitute of the common conveniences of life, and above all, deafened by the frantic cries with which the hospital continually resounded. When the first rigors of his imprisonment were relaxed, Tasso pursued his studies, and poured forth his emotions in every form of verse. Some of his most beautiful minor poems were composed during this period. After more than seven years' confinement, the poet was liberated at the intercession of the Duke of Mantua. Prom this time he wandered from city to city; the hallucinations of his mind never entirely ceased. Towards the close of the year 1594 he took up his residence at Rome, where he died at the age of fifty-two. Tasso was particularly happy in choosing the most engaging subject that could inspire a modern poet--the struggle between the Christians and the Saracens. The Saracens considered themselves called on to subjugate the earth to the faith of Mohammed; the Christians to enfranchise the sacred spot where their divine founder suffered death. The religion of the age was wholly warlike. It was a profound, disinterested, enthusiastic, and poetic sentiment, and no period has beheld such a brilliant display of valor. The belief in the supernatural, which formed a striking characteristic of the time, seemed to have usurped the laws of nature and the common course of events. The faith against which the crusaders fought appeared to them the worship of the powers of darkness. They believed that a contest might exist between invisible beings as between different nations, and when Tasso armed the dark powers of enchantment against the Christian knights, he only developed and embellished a popular idea. The scene of the Jerusalem Delivered, so rich in recollections and associations with all our religious feelings, is one in which nature displays her riches and treasures, and where descriptions, in turn the most lovely and the most austere, attract the pen of the poet. All the nations of Christendom send forth their warriors to the army of the cross, and the whole world thus becomes his patrimony. Whatever interest the taking of Troy might possess for the Greeks, or the vanity of the Romans might attach to the adventures of AEneas, whom they adopted as their progenitor, it may be asserted that neither the Iliad nor the Aeneid possesses the dignity of subject, the interest at the same time divine and human, and the varied dramatic action which are peculiar to the Jerusalem Delivered.