gli intieramente fu casto: degli anni
primi non mi favello mai di modo ch' io possa alcuna cosa di certo qui
raccontare."
_Opere_, xxxiii. 235.]

[Footnote 37: It is to be found in the collected works, _ut supra_; both
of the philosopher and the poet.]

[Footnote 38: It is an extraordinary instance of a man's violating, in
older life, the better critical principles of his youth,--that Tasso, in
his _Discourses on Poetry_, should have objected to a passage in Ariosto
about sighs and tears, as being a "conceit too lyrical," (though it was
warranted by the subtleties of madness, see present volume, p. 219), and
yet afterwards not in the same conceits when wholly without warrant.]

[Footnote 39: [Greek:

Dardanion aut aerchen, eus pais Agchisao,
Aineias ton hup Agchisae teke di Aphroditae
Idaes en knaemoisi, thea brotps eunaetheisa
Ouk oios hama toge duo Antaenoros uie,
Archilochos t, Akamas te machaes en eidute pasaes.

_Iliad_, ii. 819.]

It is curious that these five lines should abound as much in _a_'s
Tasso's first stanza does in o's. Similar monotonies are strikingly
observable in the nomenclatures of Virgil. See his most perfect poem, the
_Georgics_:

"Omnia secum
`Armentarius `Afer agit, tectumque, Laremque,
`Armaque, `Amyclaeumque canem, Cressamque pharetram."
Lib. iii. 343.

It is clear that Dante never thought of this point. See his Mangiadore,
Sanvittore, Natan, Raban, &c. at the end of the twelfth canto of the
_Paradiso_. Yet in his time poetry was _recitatived_ to music. So it was
in Petrarch's, who was a lutenist, and who "tried" his verses, to see
how they would go to the instrument. Yet Petrarch could allow himself to
write such a quatrain as the following list of rivers

"Non Tesin, Po, Varo, Arno, Adige e Tebro,
Eufrate, Tigre, Nilo, Ermo, Indo c Gange,
Tana, Istro, Alfeo, Garrona, e 'l mar the frange,
Rodano, Ibero, Ren, Senna, _Albia, Era, Ebro!_"

In Tasso's _Sette Giornate_, to which Black thinks Milton indebted for
his grand use of proper names, the following is the way in which the poet
writes

"Di Silvani
Di Pani, e d' Egipani, e d' altri erranti,
Ch'empier le solitarie inculte selve
D'antiche maraviglie; e quell'accolto
Esercito di Bacco in oriente
Ond'egli vinse, e trionfo deg