The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Sorrento, near Naples, 1544. Died at Rome, 1595. Aged 51.] One of the small cluster of spirits whose uttered thoughts have fastened upon the world’s ear for all time. One of the still smaller group whose personal history, growing out of the poetical temperament, weighs in interest against their consummate work. We discover too little of the life of Shakspeare. We know too much of the story of Torquato Tasso. The Swan of Avon sings, and not a milk-white feather is ruffled in the song. Personal anguish quivers through the high heroic strain of him who, in Italian, with unequalled art, told the inspiriting story of the recovered Holy City. How shall Torquato’s touching and saddening tale be concentrated in a sentence? He was already a scholar when a child--delicately organized in the flesh--wondrously endowed in soul. At eighteen he had given forth a poem--worthy sign of his coming strength. He was at the Court of Alphonso II., Duke of Ferrara, when he commenced his great epic, and dared--he was a poet’s son--to fix his strong affection upon the Princess Leonora, sister of the Duke. In 1575, the “Jerusalem Delivered” was completed. Its beauty was too evident, for it raised a pitiless storm of envy, enmity, and persecution. His passion for the princess was detected, and he was imprisoned as a madman. Breaking loose, he wandered footsore from place to place, but found his way too speedily back to Ferrara. Caught again, he was again confined, suffering new imprisonment for seven long years. He came forth at last, a melancholy man. It availed him little that at Rome, in 1595, he was solemnly crowned with laurel by the pope, and every honour showered upon his illustrious head. He died, worn out with troubles of heart and mind, only a few days after his sublime coronation. The “Jerusalem Delivered” is built upon the essential basis of epic poetry--the profound and associated sympathy of innumerable hearers. In the poem, as out of it, the universal heart of Christendom is arrayed against the misbelieving world. Tasso wrote in an age when the religious passion, which was the soul of the Crusades, survived sufficiently for a hope in the poet that his strain would reanimate the Red-cross warfare. As man, and as poet, enthusiasm was predominant in him. The salient characters of the poem are well-defined, each complete in itself, and all standing well apart from, and relieving one another, although hardly, perhaps, flung forth in desirable plenitude of dramatic life and effect. The subject, as we all know, was the successful first Crusade--which took Jerusalem--under the pious, magnanimous, and truly heroic Godfrey of Bouillon. The structure of the plot is well balanced: the art of the writing exquisite: possibly too much so. It is generally self-conscious and elaborate, rather than inspired and impetuous. [By Alessandro d’Este, and presented to the Capitoline Museum by Canova. Tasso’s tomb in St. Onuphrius was not erected until some time after his death. There is a portrait in mosaic over it.]