Anna, the eldest of the three sisters above named, in 1548 was married to the celebrated Francis, duke of Guise, and, after his decease, to James of Savoy, duke of Nemours. Lucretia, some years later than Tasso's arrival at her brother's court, was married to the prince of Urbino, only fifteen years old, when she herself was thirty-seven. This was one of those state alliances which so little resemble treaties of peace, that they deserve to be branded as treaties of discord, in which royal and noble parents sacrifice their children, if not to Moloch, at least to Mammon—nay, too often to both,—for purposes of family aggrandisement, by adding territory to territory, and confounding blood with blood. On the occasion of these unhappy nuptials, Tasso, "as in duty bound," wrote an epithalamium, which had, in its predictions of felicity, the equivocal qualification for excelling in that kind of poetry which Waller, with experienced adroitness, hinted to Charles II., when rallied by his majesty on having composed a far finer panegyric on Cromwell than on himself—the qualification of fiction; for scarcely had the ill-paired couple had time to fall out, when the gallant prince left his bride to volunteer in a crusade against the Turks, with whom everlasting warfare, in every petty form of hostility, was wont to be carried on by the states of Italy. The union ultimately was dissolved, without the intervention of death; and Lucretia, as duchess of Urbino, returned to Ferrara. For many years afterwards, she was, more openly than either her brother or her younger sister, the patron of Tasso, and to her are some of his most graceful lyrics addressed.
Leonora, the third and younger sister, remained unmarried. Being highly attractive in person, in manner, and in mind, it is no wonder if Torquato, having many opportunities of ingratiating himself in her favour, should be gradually betrayed, under the guise of that romantic strain of adulation to rank and beauty (especially in verse) which the fashion of the times not only tolerated but sanctioned, to insinuate all the fervour of a passion which, though hardly aware of it himself, and altogether unacknowledged by its sensitive object, might yet be harboured in the bosoms of both, though so secretly, that each more complacently and jealously watched the symptoms of a tender attachment in the other, than cared to examine the reality of the same in themselves. The mystery, thus cherished, for the tantalising delight of a hope too remote to be fulfilled, except at the sacrifice of every thing but that love, for which, if true, nothing might be deemed too much to be sacrificed, has never been cleared up, and all reasoning and conjecture on the subject, at this distance of time, must be vain. It has been with equal confidence both affirmed and denied, that the poet imprudently aspired to the hand of the princess, and that the princess as imprudently surrendered her heart to the poet, though, from necessity, she withheld her hand. From the numberless canzoni and sonetti, of which love is the theme, among the rime of Tasso, no premises towards the solution of this problem can be drawn. Dante and Petrarch, in all their effusions of the kind, are constant each to his respective mistress. Beatrice and Laura are the perpetual idols of their amorous devotion; but to so many—or, if to one, under so many different names and characters,—are Tasso's adorations addressed, that he may have had fifty fits of passion for as many flames, and been as true in turn to each and equally volatile to all. It is, however, a remarkable circumstance, that three of the greatest poets of Italy should owe as much of their posthumous renown to their questionable love as to their acknowledged genius, having been avowedly attached to ladies whose very existence is unascertained at this day, though volumes have been written, proving nothing more than (to borrow the comprehensive judgment of sir Roger de Coverley) that "much may be said on both sides."
In the mean time, whatever was the subsequent conduct of Alfonso towards Tasso, there seems to be no doubt that, for a considerable period during which the poet was engaged upon his great work, the duke countenanced him in the way most agreeable to his literary ambition and his personal vanity; for he loved rich apparel, splendid apartments, sumptuous fare, and to be associated with persons of the highest rank—feeling that he could adorn and dignify the circle in which he moved, both as a man of genius exalted above competition by intellectual endowments, and as a man of the world qualified to shine in external demeanour among gentlemen and soldiers as well as among students and men of letters. During this prosperous period—when the smiles of princesses, who were pleased to receive the homage of his muse, flattered his gentler affections, and the favour of sovereigns gratified the pride of a heart easily elevated to an eminence of self-satisfaction, from which the fall when it came was the more terrible, and the dashing to pieces of its hopes and its claims the more humiliating and deplorable—Tasso accompanied the cardinal Luigi as legate to the court of France. Here his fame had prepared the way for his reception with peculiar honour by Charles IX., himself both a lover of verse and a versifier. It is said that the king offered the poet some splendid presents, which the latter declined to accept, though he was so scantily provided with a wardrobe, that he left the kingdom, at the end of twelve months, in the same suit of clothes in which he entered it. The snake has but one skin, but while that is wearing out another is forming beneath: it would be well for poets, who live on court expectations, if they were as well provided.
As not many personal anecdotes are related of our poet, two or three indifferent ones may be given here as specimens of the tone of his conversation and address in public. A poet of some repute having committed a crime for which he was condemned to die, Tasso resolved to obtain, if possible, a mitigation of the punishment. At the palace he learned that the sentence was about to be executed immediately. Undiscouraged, however, he pressed forward; and being admitted to the presence, he thus addressed the king:—"May it please your majesty, I am come to implore you to put to death a wretch, who has brought disgrace upon philosophy, by showing that she cannot stand out against human depravity." The king, struck with the turn of the request, spared the criminal. Being asked by his majesty one day, "Whether men most resembled God in happiness, in sovereign power, or in the ability to do good?" Tasso replied, "Men can resemble God only by their virtue."—Again, before the same monarch a discussion was held to determine what condition in life is most unfortunate. "In my opinion," said Tasso, "the most deplorable condition is that of an impatient old man, borne down by poverty, who has neither fortune to preserve him from want, nor philosophy to support himself under suffering."
In the course of this journey, whatever he may have gained in honour at the French court, gratification in the society of eminent contemporaries, and knowledge of the country and people of his hero, Godfrey, Torquato lost the favour of cardinal Luigi, as Ariosto forfeited that of the cardinals kinsman and predecessor, Hippolyto of Este; though not for the same reason—want of servility to his highness (Luigi probably not exacting such base homage as Ariosto's barbarian patron had done), but for having manifested more zeal for the catholic faith than, in the opinion of some of his confidants, was deemed politic at a time, when, for the most treacherous purposes, previous to the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the protestants were treated with unwonted indulgence, to throw them off their guard. Hereupon he returned to Italy, though not immediately to Ferrara; for, travelling in company with Manzuoli, the secretary of the late embassy, we find that he arrived at Rome in January, 1572. Here he was cordially welcomed by many of his father's old acquaintances, as well as greatly distinguished for his own sake. Pope Pius V. honoured him with an audience, and the privilege of kissing his foot.
Through the mediation of the duchess of Urbino and Leonora, he was soon afterwards formally admitted into the service of Alfonso, with a pension of a hundred and eighty gold crowns a year, and the understanding that no personal duties would be required of him; but that he should be at liberty to pursue his studies and finish his poem at his own leisure. Generous as this provision undoubtedly was, it yet made him a captive in golden chains, too weak to bind the limbs, but strong enough to enthral the soul and enslave the mind. So, at least, Torquato found his obligation; and even when on both sides it had been broken, after his second imprisonment, he was never in spirit enfranchised from the yoke of Alfonso, till death set him free. His own testimony concerning his patron's munificence at this time, long after he had lost his favour, is honourable to both:—"He raised me from the darkness of my low estate to the light and glory of his court; he removed me from penury to abundance; he exceedingly enhanced the value of my works, by often and willing listening while I read, and treating their author with every mark of esteem. He placed me at his table, and countenanced me with his personal attention; and he never denied me a favour which I requested."
Under these auspices, while Tasso was still vigorously prosecuting that splendid crusade of his muse, the poetical siege of Jerusalem, and had now nearly made himself master of it for an everlasting stronghold of his poetical sovereignty, his exuberant mind poured out multitudes of sonnets, canzoni, and other miscellanies in verse and prose—almost entirely on transient themes, love fancies, and panegyrical attempts—
——"to give a deathless lot
To names inglorious, born to be forgot."
Among these, in the composition of which it might be questioned whether he was wasting his genius or cultivating it, he produced something more excellent, in the form of a pastoral drama. Accordingly, the most beautiful offspring of his imagination—so far as refers to exquisite grace of diction, and consummate skill in adorning a subject altogether artificial, and feigning a state of society that never did, never could, never ought to exist,—in a story not very natural though the incidents are few, nor very happily connected or intelligibly developed,—his "Aminta" appeared, written in flowing verse of various measures without rhyme, and enriched with lyric chorusses of extraordinary elegance. How the public exhibition of such a drama could be tolerated, before the most exalted personages of the state, ladies of the highest character, and religionists of the most plausible professions, is very difficult for us, in our cold climate, and with our severer as well as juster sentiments of decorum, to imagine. All that can be said in extenuation of the audience, and perhaps of the poet, comes to this presumption, that, though the piece abounds with descriptions and allusions the most voluptuous and fascinating to awaken the most perilous passions in youth, and which no gravity of age ought to endure, such were the manners of the day, and so little of evil was apprehended, where the serpent, that allured Eve with his wiles of beauty among the flowers of paradise, put on this pastoral disguise of the innocence of the golden age, that the fair and the virtuous alike imagined themselves as guiltless in listening to his blandishments, as Milton represents the mother of mankind to have been unsuspicious of danger, when she followed the tempter to the forbidden tree, and entered into a parley with him there, till at length, beguiled by his subtilty, "she plucked, she ate." And here a subject too delicate to be handled on the present occasion must be left to every one's conscience who indulges in the luxury of such reading as the work under consideration furnishes. It is remarkable that the author, designating himself under the name of Tirsi, seems to have been forewarned of the malady which soon afterwards overwhelmed him, and to which, no doubt, from constitutional temperament he had been prone from his youth upward, and which, in premature old age, cast such clouds of mystery over the gloom and splendour of his latter life. "Knowest thou not what Tirsi wrote, when, fired with frenzy, he wandered through the forest, at once moving laughter and pity among the lovely nymphs and shepherds? Nor wrote he even then 'things worthy to be laughed at, although he did such things.'"
The duchess of Urbino being absent from Ferrara, when Tasso's muse, like Habington's "halcyon," produced