vernment from turning it into a barrack for the city
police a few years ago, when the name of one of Italy's greatest poets
should alone have protected it. It was far from the streets and
thoroughfares in older times, and the quiet sadness of its garden called
up the infinite melancholy of the poor poet who drew his last breath of
the fresh open air under the old tree at the corner, and saw Rome the
last time, as he turned and walked painfully back to the little room
where he was to die. It is better to think of it so, when one has seen
it in those days, than to see it as it is now, standing out in vulgar
publicity upon the modern avenue.

There died the man who had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been
slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden
himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to
receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been
crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant
passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a
wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for many
years at a work so perfectly harmonious as 'Jerusalem Freed'; and it
seems strange that the hot-headed, changeable southerner should have
stood up as the determined champion of the Epic Unity against the
school of Ariosto, the great northern poet, who had believed in
diversity of action as a fundamental principle of the Epic; it is
stranger still and a proof of his power that Tasso should have earned
something like universal glory against the long-standing supremacy of
Ariosto in the same field, in the same half-century, and living at the
same court. Everything in Tasso's life was contradictory, everything in
his works was harmonious. Even after he was dead, the contrasts of glory
and misery followed his bones like fate. He died in the arms of Cardinal
Aldobrandini, the Pope's nephew, almost on the eve of his intended
crowning in the Capitol; he was honoured with a magnificent funeral, and
his body was laid in an obscure corner, enclosed in a poor deal coffin.
It was six years before the monks of Sant' Onofrio dug up the bones and
placed them in a little lead box 'out of pity,' as the inscription on
the metal lid told, and buried them again under a poor slab that bore
his name, and little else; and when a monument was at last made to him
in the nineteenth century, by the subscriptions of literary societies,
it was