"If death were not, there would be nothing upon earth more miserable than man." On the 25th of April 1595, about the middle of the day, the poet cried: "_In manus tuas, Domine...._[189]" The remainder of the verse was scarcely audible, as though it had been uttered by a departing traveller. The author of the _Henriade_ expires at the Hôtel de Villette, on a quay of the Seine[190], and rejects the aid of the Church; the bard of the _Gerusalemme_ dies a Christian at Sant' Onofrio: compare and see what beauty faith lends to death. All that is related of Tasso's posthumous triumph appears to me to be open to suspicion. His ill-fortune was even more persistent than has been supposed. He did not die at the hour indicated for his triumph: he survived that projected triumph by twenty-five days. He did not lie to his destiny: he was never crowned, not even after death; his remains were not exposed at the Capitol in senator's robes amid the throng and the tears of the people: he was buried, as he had ordered, in the Church of Sant' Onofrio. The stone with which they covered him, again according to his wish, bore neither date nor name; ten years later, Manso, Marchese Della Villa[191], Tasso's last friend and Milton's host composed the admirable epitaph: HIC JACET TORQUATUS TASSUS [Sidenote: Tasso's tomb.] Manso succeeded only with difficulty in having it carved; for the monks, who religiously observed testamentary wishes, objected to any inscription: and yet, without the _Hic jacet_ or the words, _Torquati Tassi ossa_, Tasso's ashes would have been lost in the hermitage on the Janiculum, as Poussin's have been at San Lorenzo in Lucina. Cardinal Cintio formed the plan of erecting a mausoleum to the singer of the Holy Sepulchre; the plan was abortive. Cardinal Bevilacqua drew up a pompous epitaph destined for the slab of another future mausoleum, and the thing went no further. Two centuries later, the brother of Napoleon thought about a monument at Sorrento: Joseph soon bartered Tasso's cradle for the Cid's tomb. Lastly, in our own days, a grand funeral decoration has been begun in honour of the Italian Homer, once poor and wandering like the Greek Homer: will the work be completed? As for me, I prefer to any marble tumulus the little stone in the chapel of which I spoke as follows in the _Itinéraire_: "I looked[192] in a deserted church for the tomb of this last painter[193], and I had some trouble in finding it: the same thing had happened to me in Rome[194] with the tomb of Tasso. After all, the ashes of a religious and unfortunate poet are not too ill-placed in a hermitage. The singer of the _Gerusalemme_ seems to have taken refuge in this unknown burying-place, as though to escape men's persecutions; he fills the world with his fame and himself lies unrecognised under the orange-tree[195] of Sant' Onofrio."