Page:Amyntas, a tale of the woods; from the Italien of Torquato Tasso (IA amyntastaleofwoo00tass).pdf/35

 a courtier and court-poet of that time, now forgotten but for this mention of him. The Mopsus mentioned elsewhere, is understood to mean Speron Speroni, a harsh critic, who prophecied ill of the Jerusalem, and had too sullenly warned Tasso against going to court. I need not add, that his court prophecy was better than his critical one.

The Choruses at the end of the Acts, for the most part, have a lyric majesty that announces the epic poet. They do not appear however to we been originally intended for the work. Some of them unquestionably were not. The one, for instance, at the end of the Fourth Act, is the first stanza of a magnificent canzone, which Tasso Wrote thirteen years after, when he was in prison, on the nuptials of Don Cæsar of Este with Donna Virginia de' Medici. Nor is it easy to see how it got into it's present situation. The Chorus at