departed than Sanseverino arrived from Marseilles, and pursuing Dragut, overtook him in full retreat for Constantinople. Treachery had been at work; a messenger of the Prince had been corrupted by the Spanish Ambassador on his way through Rome; and getting on board the fleet, used his credentials from the French King to announce his abandonment of the enterprise. Failing to persuade Dragut to resume the attack, the Prince accompanied him to the Court of Soliman, in the hope of fresh succour in the ensuing year.

The Ambassador now passed his time at the French Court in alternations of hope and despair. It was a complicated game; none of the competitors cared anything for the Prince, except as he might serve their interest. Not only the King and his Council, but the ladies of the Court, the Queen and Diane de Poitiers, must be propitiated. He found himself deceived by the fair words of a people 'too polite to say no, and whose disposition is such that no sooner have they thought of a design, than they proclaim it as if it were already accomplished.'

The most Christian King had no hesitation about hiring infidel hosts to massacre an innocent population of his fellow-Christians on the shores of Italy. But a more sustained attack than the mere raids of corsairs was required to induce the Imperialists to draw off their forces from other points. Little did the Spaniards care, under shelter of the forts that stud the Italian coast, that the defenceless inhabitants were plundered, so long as the possessions of the Crown were not seriously endangered. Encouraged by the intrigues of Paul IV., who threatened, with the aid of France, to expel the Imperialists from Italy, Tasso ventured to assume the functions of a prophet, and announced in one of the intercepted letters the approaching death of Philip and the

ruin of the Emperor. But in spite of his prayers and his prophecies, heaven and earth equally failed him. Emissaries from Protestant German States were in treaty with the King, and could offer more than a disinherited prince. The fortresses of Toul, Verdun, and Metz were at that time capable of a successful resistance to the German besiegers; and relieved Henry of the necessity of creating a diversion elsewhere. It appeared, moreover, that the Ottoman power was better pleased, at the instigation of the Pope, to pillage the defenceless coast of Corsica than to engage in a doubtful encounter with Spanish troops for the benefit of France.

The poetic

At length all hope deserts him in 1553 he writes, I entreat you to use your influence with the Prince to send some one here in my room, so that I may be free to pay some attention to my own honour and the life of my unhappy wife and children.' It is not, however, till February of the following year that his letters are dated from Rome. In receipt of a small pension from the Prince, in educating Torquato, who had escaped from Naples to join him, and in vain attempts to obtain some remission of his sentence, he passed several years. genius finds a fund of consolation in itself. In the midst of the Jeremiads which fill his letters at this period, he never fails to have an ode or a sounet to submit to the criticism of his friends, and a fourth book Degl' Amori now issued from the press of Giolito in Venice. Though publishing was almost a new trade, vexations between authors and publishers were already part of its history. Desiring to ingratiate himself with the French Court, the new volume was dedicated to Margherita, sister of the King; but as a term more suitable to her dignity, 'poesie' was substituted for gl' amori.' In passing through the press, either through care

lessness or, as he insists, in malice, the old title was restored, and it came into the world as The Amours of Bernardo Tasso for the Princess Margherita. It was seriously vexatious, for he could not afford to give offence. His fortunes were at the lowest. In February 1556 the news of his wife's death broke his spirit, so that health and hopealike failed. His relatives retained his children in Naples, and refused to pay the interest of his wife's dowry. Every avenue was tried to approach the King of Spain; but Philip was seldom in a relenting mood, especially where his religious bigotry had been offended. He thought of entering the priesthood as a last resource, having observed that ecclesiastics have methods of enriching themselves. But at this moment the tables again turned, and the actors changed sides once more, like the complex mazes of a dance, where the opposite in one figure becomes the partner of the next. Again it was found necessary to teach a lesson to an insolent Pope; the friends of France, and Tasso among them, beheld with dismay the troops of Spain approaching the walls of Rome. While the superstitious fears of Alva withheld him from ordering an assault upon the holy city, the Protestant mercenaries whom Caraffa had hired for its defence created such terror within the walls, that Tasso made his escape and found a refuge at the Court of the Duke of Urbino. 'Here,' he writes, 'I am in a peaceful harbour, and not only receive daily favours for myself, but if I were not unwilling to interrupt Torquato's studies, the Duke would provide him with a wife and a dowry.'

It required a far-seeing adept to change his stakes adroitly in the game that was being played by foreign rivals upon Italian soil. Tasso seemed again to have chosen the losing colour when the Duke of Guise marched a French army into

Italy, and the Prince of Salerno, as a pensionary of the King, refused to continue his pittance to one who, now in the service of Guidobaldo, belonged to the opposite faction. His sanguine temper, however, laid a new foundation for his hopes where he had transferred his services. He set to work with incredible perseverance upon the ungrateful task of recasting the complimentary stanzas of his great poem, already prepared for the press. The French King was made to yield the post of honour to the 'Magnanimo Carlo.' He foretells the acquisition of Britain to the Crown of Spain; and the heroes admitted to his 'Temple of Fame' are henceforth to be those only who fought under Spanish colours. It was no slight recognition of the merit of the work, when the Academy of Venice offered to print it at their expense; and marked their esteem for the author by appointing him their Chancellor, with a salary of 200 gold ducats. The privilege of copyright was then a matter of personal favour, and depended upon the action of each separate State. By the influence of the Duke it was procured for him for a period of ten years from Spain, Florence, and other Italian Courts; but with all these favourable circumstances the success fell short of his expectations.

Whether it was from force of habit, or dissatisfaction with the result, scarcely was he freed from the anxiety of launching into the world the fruits of almost a life's labour, than he returned to his old employment as secretary to Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Meantime he had paid a visit to Ferrara, and witnessed the sad changes that had been made there since he had first entered it, when hope was young, and the Court of Renée had welcomed the rising genius. At the instigation of the Jesuits, and urged by Henry II. and Pope Giulio III.,

a persecution had been organised to crush the development of free thought. The Court was deserted by its brightest ornaments; Renée herself had been separated from her children, and subjected to close surveillance. Duke Ercole was now dead; and Renée, dissatisfied with her son's proceedings, was meditating her famous retreat into France. During the six following years he executed various commissions at the Courts of Italy; and among others, an unsuccessful one at Rome. His report of it in the Mantuan letters exhibits the insolence of the Pope in his treatment of foreign ambassadors, and the vast influence which it was thought worth while to purchase at the cost of such deep ignominy.

At length, in the year 1569, his growing infirmities intimated the necessity of relinquishing the more active employments; and the office of Podestà at Ostiglia being vacant, it was conferred on him as an honourable retirement. How he amused himself we have seen in the criminal proceedings already spoken of; the inhuman records are compressed into a short period, for in September of the same year, at the age of seventy-five, the old man, embittered by misfortune, and learning no lesson of mercy to others from his own sufferings, closed his adventurous life.

If humanity should be inclined to doubt the evidence he has left under his own hand of the state of Italian prisons and criminal administration, recent facts exposed by Mr. Gladstone in Letters from Italy in 1852 leave no room for incredulity. A report more recently supplied to the writer of this paper by one for many years familiar with the subject, represents the genius loci still haunting the tribunals where long ago it found congenial home in the cruelty of officers of

state, fostered by the example of the Church: accused persons are still dragged to gaol screaming from the torture of the notorious pollici; within the walls the ears are assailed by cries of prisoners insufficiently fed; while the salary of the custode is too small to secure an efficient superintendence. Can we indeed assure ourselves that the future page of civilised history will be kept pure from equally sanguinary stains? Tasso in that age might have justified his proceedings on the plea of custom; it has been reserved for a more enlightened school to maintain on reasons of philosophy and religion such principles of irresponsible government as necessitate a recourse to lawless violence and systematic cruelty.1

If Tasso were to reappear upon the scene, he would doubtless lament the degeneracy of modern tribunals, and scorn our ineffectual methods of criminal detection; yet in other relations of life he appears to be of the same flesh and blood, and to have the same feelings with ourselves. His real sorrows, hearty resentments, fidelity, and domestic affections, are exhibitions of our common nature under circumstances of trial happily exceptional. The varied incidents of his career supply materials for a romance, while his letters cannot fail to attract readers for whom fiction is not an essential stimulant to sympathy. If he descends sometimes to the meanest resources of flattery, we may remember that the same base method of approaching the great has not been shunned by authors of high reputation in recent times. The obvious moral of his story would be to illustrate the vanity of a life spent in dependence on princes-a lesson scarcely needed when princes are no longer arbiters of their subjects' fortunes. A reflection more adapted to a gold-adoring genera

tion is suggested by his misfortunes and calls to mind the cynical advice of Junius: Let your views in life be directed to a solid, however moderate, independence; without it no man can be happy. or even honest.' 6 Necessity,' Bernardo

wrote, 'knows no shame.' The Amadigi may be deemed too extravagant for these practical days; some portion of its spirit probably evaporated in the adapting of its eulogistic verses to fresh objects of his intended praise. Admitting its claims to a dolcezza which, he affirmed, Torquato would never rival, it must at all times have been weari

Ariosto and the

some reading. Gerusalemme will be read with pleasure while the Amadigi remains on the shelf. But the letters abound in matter for the philosopher and the historian, and they will long retain their value as models of composition. One who can appreciate the descriptive merits of his picture of Naples in Letter 121 of Seghezzi's collection, and can catch the easier style of his more familiar correspondence in the recent publications, will not have much to learn from modern changes in the language, and need not be afraid of Della Cruscan criticism.

G.

SUMMER morning at Dresden is one of the pleasantest, brightest things in nature. One who walks through the streets encounters a constant stream, stirring yet not turbulent, of busy life: the cheerful aspect given by the warm sun to the surrounding houses; the movement and bustle of the open market place, whose walls look down on the bargaining and chaffering beneath, just for all the world as they looked down when Canaletto painted them, thus lending the grace of the past to the vigour of the present; the passing glimpses caught in little squares or places of leafy trees and plashing fountains relieving the picture of human industry with touches of natural beauty; all these make a combination of delightful sights and sounds which can hardly be surpassed. Or if the traveller is weary of the presence of his kind, and would be alone with the great mother, he can stroll down to the banks of the Elbe and contemplate the quiet in place of the noisy stream, as its waters flow by him in a broad, strong current. The timber rafts-with little log huts built upon them, which it bears down to their destination, guided and inhabited by men who have cut the timber from its native forest, and who thus find in the logs house room, means of travelling, and merchandise combined-have such ample room on the bosom of the wide river, that they give an added motion to its beauty without marring the sense of solitude. Or, does the wanderer prefer nature mirrored and idealised by art, nature reflected for him in the magic glass which shows its beauties and conceals its defects, to nature seen by the unaided light of his own eyes, then he can pass from the heat and brilliancy of the outside world to the

cool atmosphere and subdued light of that gallery which is an inexhaustible source of wealth to the art student.

The

This was the course chosen, on one morning such as we have described, by Rupert Graham, a young painter resident in Dresden, who, strolling first through the other galleries to accustom his eye to form and colour, rested at length in the shrine of the Madonna di San Sisto, and worshipped the mighty genius who gave to the world that wondrous picture of a beauty more than humanly perfect, of a strength and purity which cannot be less than Divine. young artist gazed at this with a sort of adoration; his whole being concentrated itself in the act of looking until his eyes seemed fixed upon their object as are the bird's on the rattlesnake's or the patient's on the mesmerist's: his senses were unable to comprehend anything else in the world; the universe for him was that picture and nothing else; the curtains and walls which surrounded the painting seemed to fade mysteriously away and leave it and him suspended in some remote mid-air.

In this state of mind, one probably resembling the so-called trance of the clairvoyant (for, as he never lost sight of the picture, but only saw a transformation take place around it, it could hardly be an ordinary slumber), a strange vision came to him. Accessories and surroundings of furniture grew again round the picture, but they were not those which naturally belonged to it. He seemed to see it reposing upon an eascl raised on a sort of throne in a painter's studio. The chairs and sofas, the canvasses on the walls, the litter on the floor, seemed all strangely familiar to him, and he