guest' exactly seems to suit him.

[Footnote 82: The numerous plaintive requests for a silver cup, a ring,
a silk cloak and such trifles in his later letters indicate something
quite childish in his pre-occupations.]

And yet he allowed himself to become the spoiled child of his
misfortunes. Without them, largely self-created as they were, Tasso
could not now appeal to our hearts. Nor does he appeal to us as Dante,
eating the salt bread of patrons' tables, does; as Milton, blind and
fallen on evil days; as Chatterton, perishing in pride and silence; as
Johnson, turning from the stairs of Chesterfield; as Bruno, averting
stern eyes from the crucifix; as Leopardi, infusing the virus of his
suffering into the veins of humanity; as Heine, motionless upon his
mattress grave. These more potent personalities, bequeathing to the
world examples of endurance, have won the wreath of never-blasted bays
which shall not be set on Tasso's forehead. We crown him with frailer
leaves, bedewed with tears tender as his own sentiment, and aureoled
with the light that emanates from pure and delicate creations of his
fancy.

Though Tasso does not command admiration by heroism, he wins compassion
as a beautiful and finely-gifted nature inadequate to cope with the
conditions of his century. For a poet to be independent in that age of
intellectual servitude was well-nigh impossible. To be light-hearted and
ironically indifferent lay not in Tasso's temperament. It was no less
difficult for a man of his mental education to maintain the balance
between orthodoxy and speculation, faith and reason, classical culture
and Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. He
belonged in one sense too much, and in another sense too little, to his
epoch. One eminent critic calls him the only Christian of the Italian
Renaissance, another with equal justice treats him as the humanistic
poet of the Catholic Revival.[83]

Properly speaking, he was the genius of that transition from the
Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, on which I dwelt in the second
chapter of this work. By natural inclination he belonged to the line of
artists which began with Boccaccio and culminated in Ariosto. But his
training and the bias of the times in which he lived, made him break
with Boccaccio's tradition. He tried to be the poet of the Council of
Trent, without having assimilated hypocrisy or acquired false taste,
without comprehending the essentially prosaic an