excellences, and it is possible to find defects
in both; pedantic adherence to antique precedent must end in frigid
failure under the present conditions of intellectual culture; yet it
cannot be denied that the cycle of Renaissance poetry was closed by
Ariosto; let us therefore attempt creation in a liberal spirit, trained
by both these influences. He could not, however, when he put this theory
forward in elaborate prose, abstain from propositions, distinctions,
deductions, and conclusions, all of which were discutable, and each of
which his critics and his honor held him bound to follow. In short,
while planning and producing the _Gerusalemme_, he was involved in
controversies on the very essence of his art. These controversies had
been started by himself and he could not do otherwise than maintain the
position he had chosen. His poet's inspiration, his singer's
spontaneity, came thus constantly into collision with his own deliberate
utterances. A perplexed self-scrutiny was the inevitable result, which
pedagogues who were not inspired and could not sing, but who delighted
in minute discussion, took good care to stimulate. The worst, however,
was that he had erected in his own mind a critical standard with which
his genius was not in harmony. The scholar and the poet disagreed in
Tasso; and it must be reckoned one of the drawbacks of his age and
education that the former preceded the latter in development. Something
of the same discord can be traced in contemporary painting, as will be
shown when I come to consider the founders of the Bolognese Academy.

At the end of 1565 Tasso was withdrawn from literary studies and society
in Padua. The Cardinal Luigi d'Este offered him a place in his
household; and since this opened the way to Ferrara and Court-service,
it was readily accepted. It would have been well for Tasso, at this
crisis of his fate, if the line of his beloved Aeneid--

Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum--

that line which warned young Savonarola away from Ferrara, had sounded
in his ears, or met his eyes in some Virgilian _Sortes_. It would have
been well if his father, disillusioned by the _Amadigi's_ ill-success,
and groaning under the galling yoke of servitude to Princes, had
forbidden instead of encouraging this fatal step. He might himself have
listened to the words of old Speroni, painting the Court as he had
learned to know it, a Siren fair to behold and ravishing of song, but
hiding