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246 carefully expunged. Cinthio proved a kind and considerate patron; and Clement, who was endowed with a regal instinct for doing the right thing at the right time, was on the point of honouring Tasso with a public coronation after the example of Petrarch, when on April 25, 1595, death removed him from earthly honours and indignities in the convent of San Onofrio, where he had for some time found an asylum, and where the crown which should have arrayed his temples was placed upon his bier.

Apart irom the failings without which he Would hardly have been a poet, and the infirmities for which it would, be unjust to make him responsible, Tasso's deportment throughout life was that of an amiable, high-minded, and accomplished gentleman. Two defects alone produce a painful impression—the entire lack of any sense of humour, and the apparent indifference to all public interests outside of court and ecclesiastical life. The former of these was congenital, irremediable, and bitterly expiated by the undignified predicaments in which it involved him; the latter would not have existed if he had lived in a better age. He did, indeed, like Spenser and Tennyson, attribute a didactic and allegorical purpose to his poem which may have been patent to his own mind, but with which no reader, if not a commentator also, ever concerned himself. Yet the significance of the Jerusalem Delivered does not solely consist in the beauty of the language and the exquisiteness of the characters; although an artificial, it is in some sense a national epic. Thanks mainly to the pressure of foreign tyrants, Protestantism and the Renaissance both had for the time been crushed in Italy, and the Italian poet who would be national must write in the spirit of the reaction. Catholicism was