ose gimcrack ecstasies before the Host in boyhood,
cannot now be fancied. If he contained the stuff of saint or simple
Christian, this was sterilized and stunted by the clever fathers in
their school at Naples.

During the years of his feverishly active adolescence Tasso played for a
while with philosophical doubts. But though he read widely and
speculated diffusely on the problems of the universe, he failed to
pierce below the surface of the questions which he handled. His own
beliefs had been tested in no red-hot crucible, before he recoiled with
terror from their analysis. The man, to put it plainly, was incapable of
honest revolt against the pietistic fashions of his age, incapable of
exploratory efforts, and yet too intelligent to rest satisfied with
gross dogmatism or smug hypocrisy. Neither as a thinker, nor as a
Christian, nor yet again as that epicene religious being, a Catholic of
the Counter-Reformation, did this noble and ingenuous, but weakly nature
attain to thoroughness.

[Footnote 81: Tasso's diffuse paraphrase of the _Stabat Mater_ might be
selected to illustrate the sentimental tenderness rather than strength
of his religious feeling.]

Tasso's mind was lively and sympathetic; not penetrative, not fitted for
forming original or comprehensive views. He lived for no great object,
whether political, moral, religious, or scientific. He committed himself
to no vice. He obeyed no absorbing passion of love or hatred. In his
misfortunes he displayed the helplessness which stirs mere pity for a
prostrate human being. The poet who complained so querulously, who wept
so copiously, who forgot offense so nonchalantly, cannot command
admiration.

There is nothing sublimely tragic in Tasso's suffering. The sentiment
inspired by it is that at best of pathos. An almost childish
self-engrossment restricted his thoughts, his aims and aspirations, to a
narrow sphere, within which he wandered incurably idealistic, pursuing
prosaic or utilitarian objects--the favor of princes, place at Courts,
the recovery of his inheritance--in a romantic and unpractical
spirit.[82] Vacillating, irresolute, peevish, he roamed through all the
towns of Italy, demanding more than sympathy could give, exhausting
friendship, changing from place to place, from lord to lord. Yet how
touching was the destiny of this laureled exile, this brilliant wayfarer
on the highroads of a world he never understood! Shelley's phrase, 'the
world's rejected