il-chamber, where they had formerly been bred, the nobles passed
into petty courts and moldered in a multitude of little capitals. Men
bearing historic names, insensible of their own degradation, bowed the
neck gladly, groveled in beatitude. Deprived of power, they consoled
themselves with privileges, patented favors, impertinences vented on the
common people. The princes amused themselves by debasing the old
aristocracy to the mire, depreciating their honors by the creations of
new titles, multiplying frivolous concessions, adding class to class of
idle and servile dependents on their personal bounty. In one word, the
paradise of mediocrities came into being.'

Tasso was born before the beginning of this epoch. But he lived into
the last decade of the sixteenth century. In every fiber of his
character he felt the influences of Italian decadence, even while he
reacted against them. His misfortunes resulted in great measure from his
not having wholly discarded the traditions of the Renaissance, though
his temperament and acquired habits made him in many points sympathetic
to the Counter-Reformation. At the same time, he was not a mediocrity,
but the last of an illustrious race of nobly gifted men of genius.
Therefore he never patiently submitted to the humiliating conditions
which his own conception of the Court, the Prince, the Church, and the
Italian gentleman logically involved at that period. He could not be
contented with the paradise of mediocrities described by Balbi. Yet he
had not strength to live outside its pale. It was the pathos of his
situation that he persisted in idealizing this paradise, and expected to
find in it a paradise of exceptional natures. This it could not be. No
one turns Circe's pigsty into a Parnassus. If Tasso had possessed force
of character enough to rend the trammels of convention and to live his
own life in a self-constructed sphere, he might still have been
unfortunate. Nature condemned him to suffering. But from the study of
his history we then had risen invigorated by the contemplation of
heroism, instead of quitting it, as now we do, with pity, but with pity
tempered by a slight contempt.

Bernardo, the father of Torquato Tasso, drew noble blood from both his
parents. The Tassi claimed to be a branch of that ancient Guelf house of
Delia Torre, lords of Milan, who were all but extirpated by the Visconti
in the fourteenth century. A remnant established themselves in mountain
strongho