When, during the boy's childhood, the prince of Salerno came into collision with the Spanish government of Naples, being subsequently outlawed and deprived of his hereditary fiefs, Tasso's father shared his patron's fate.

[3] The young Torquato, a handsome and brilliant lad, became the companion in sports and studies of Francesco Maria della Rovere, heir to the duke of Urbino.

Bernardo Tasso read cantos of his poem L'Amadigi to the duchess and her ladies, or discussed the merits of Homer and Virgil, Trissino and Ariosto, with the duke's librarians and secretaries.

He found himself the pet and prodigy of a distinguished literary circle but Bernardo had suffered in his own career so seriously from dependence on his writings and the nobility, that he now determined on a lucrative profession for his son.

In the attainment of this object, and in all the minor qualities of style and handling, Rinaldo showed marked originality, although other parts seem unfinished and betray the haste in which the poem was composed.

The flattered father allowed the work to be printed; and, after a short period of study at Bologna, he consented to his son's entering the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este.

[3] Even before that date, the young Tasso had been a frequent visitor at the Este court in Ferrara, where in 1561 he had encountered Lucrezia Bendidio, one of Eleanora d'Este's ladies-in-waiting, and fallen in love with her.

After the publication of Rinaldo he had expressed his views upon the epic in some Discourses on the Art of Poetry, which committed him to a distinct theory and gained for him the additional celebrity of a philosophical critic.

Young, handsome, accomplished in all the exercises of a well-bred gentleman, accustomed to the society of the great and learned, illustrious by his published works in verse and prose, he became the idol of the most brilliant court in Italy.

[3] Aminta, played by courtiers in an island of Po river where the duke had his Giardino di delizie, was first printed by Aldus Manutius the Younger in Venice in January 1581.

Yet the commanding qualities of this epic poem, those which revealed Tasso's individuality, and which made it immediately pass into the rank of classics, beloved by the people no less than by persons of culture, are akin to the lyrical graces of Aminta.

[4] In the Gerusalemme Liberata, as in the Rinaldo, Tasso aimed at ennobling the Italian epic style by preserving strict unity of plot and heightening poetic diction.

[5] As he had done in Rinaldo, Tasso adorned Gerusalemme Liberata with a number of romantic episodes, which have proved more popular and influential than the grand sweep of the main theme.

Thus, while the nominal hero of Gerusalemme Liberata is Godfrey of Bouillon ("Goffredo"), the leader of the First Crusade and the climax of the epic is the capture of the holy city.

Instead, the reader is attracted to the stories of Ruggiero, fiery and passionate Rinaldo, melancholy and impulsive Tancredi, and also by the chivalrous Saracens with whom they clash in love and war.

Clorinda, a brave female warrior, dons armor like Ariosto's Marfisa, fights a duel with her devoted lover, and receives baptism at his hands as she lies dying.

This sentiment, refined, noble, natural, steeped in melancholy, exquisitely graceful, pathetically touching, breathes throughout the episodes of the Gerusalemme, finds metrical expression in the languishing cadence of its mellifluous verse, and sustains the ideal life of those seductive heroines whose names were familiar as household words to all Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The poem was sent in manuscript to a large committee of eminent literary men, Tasso expressing his willingness to hear their strictures and to adopt their suggestions unless he could convert them to his own views.

The result was that each of these candid friends, while expressing in general high admiration for the epic, took some exception to its plot, its title, its moral tone, its episodes or its diction, in detail.

Some biographers have surmised that a compromising liaison with Leonora d'Este came to light, and that Tasso agreed to feign madness in order to cover her honour, but of this, there is no proof.

[5] The conclusions were that Tasso, after the beginning of 1575, developed a mental malady, which, without amounting to actual insanity, rendered him fantastical and insupportable, a cause of anxiety to his patrons.

Without exercising common patience, or giving his old friends the benefit of the doubt, Tasso broke into terms of open abuse, behaved like a lunatic, and was sent off without ceremony to the madhouse of St. Anna.

[8] After the first few months of his incarceration, he obtained spacious apartments, received the visits of friends, went abroad attended by responsible persons of his acquaintance, and was allowed to correspond freely with others.

The letters written from St. Anna to the princes and cities of Italy, to warm well-wishers, and to men of the highest reputation in the world of art and learning, form the most valuable source of information, not only on his then condition, but also on his temperament at large.

Some critics have attempted to make it appear that he was hypocritically kissing the hand which had chastised him, with the view of being released from prison, but no one who has impartially considered the whole tone and tenor of his epistles will adopt this opinion.

This was Battista Guarini; and Tasso, in his cell, had to allow odes and sonnets, poems of personal feeling, occasional pieces of compliment, to be collected and emended, without lifting a voice in the matter.

Yet Tasso felt bound to reply; and he did so with a moderation and urbanity which prove him to have been not only in full possession of his reasoning faculties, but a gentleman of noble manners also.

The man, like Hamlet, was distraught through ill accommodation to his circumstances and his age; brain-sick he was undoubtedly; and this is the Duke of Ferrara's justification for the treatment he endured.

He followed his young deliverer to the city by the Mincio, basked awhile in liberty and courtly pleasures, enjoyed a splendid reception from his paternal town of Bergamo, and reworked his 1573 tragedy Galealto Re di Norvegia into a classical drama entitled Torrismondo.

There are streets named after him in virtually every major Italian city, most notably in Bergamo, Posillipo (Naples), Rome, Turin, Palermo and Catania, as well as in Paris and Palo Alto, California.