The life of Torquato Tasso is of itself enough to show under what a gloomy cloud literature had to work in Italy all through the later sixteenth century. It was a life of dependence, and was dominated by fear--fear of rivals, of envy, of accusations of heresy, and even of murder. That this fear was not quite sane in Tasso’s case is true; but though his contemporaries saw it to be unfounded, they do not seem to have thought it absurd. He was born in 1544, the third son of Bernardo Tasso of Bergamo, who was secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno. His mother was Porzia de Rossi, a lady of a distinguished Neapolitan family. Bernardo Tasso, who was himself a verse-writer, and who gained some fame in his time as the author of a long epic founded on the _Amadis of Gaul_, was compelled to fly when his patron was driven from his principality of Salerno. Porzia, his wife, was detained in Naples by her family, which was meanly anxious not to pay her dowry. She died without again seeing her husband, but the young Torquato was allowed to return to his father. Bernardo, who found a refuge in the service of the Dukes of Urbino, sent his son to the famous legal university of Padua. Here Torquato read, but not at the law, and wrote his epic poem the _Rinaldo_--little to the satisfaction of his father, who, though a verse-writer himself, wished his son to qualify for a lucrative trade. But the son was resolved to be a poet, and not a lawyer, which decision brought with it the absolute necessity of finding a patron. The Cardinal Luigi d’Este introduced him to the Court of Ferrara. Tasso had already begun his _Jerusalem Delivered_ and his play of _Torrismondo_, and had written his _Discourses on Epic Poetry_. Alphonso II. d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, received him, and seems to have treated him in the main with great kindness. The story of Tasso’s stay at this typical Italian Court, of his passion for Leonora d’Este, of the Duke’s discovery, and of the false accusation of madness, on which the poet was imprisoned for years, is one of the best known romances of literary history; but that it is a romance there can be no doubt. From his early years Tasso seems to have suffered from a continual fear of persecution and the plots of enemies. When he accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d’Este to Paris, he imagined that some treason was being plotted against him at home. Later he thought he had been accused of heresy, and refused to be pacified by the assurances of the Duke and the head of the Inquisition, to whom he subjected his writings. He fled twice from Ferrara, and twice came back. He began to accuse the Duke of intending to have him murdered, and finally drew his dagger in the Palace on a servant whom he suspected of trying to poison him. Duke Alphonso vindicated his own character, and also gave the exact measure of the morality of the time by saying that it was absurd to suppose that he thought of killing “il Signor Tasso,” since if he