Torquato, one of the most celebrated of modern poets, was the son of Bernardo Tasso, himself eminent in the same path of literature. Bernardo, a native of Bergamo, noble but poor, published in 1560 his chivalrous poem of the Amadigi, which forms the link between the wild and half-burlesque school in which Ariosto was the chief, and the serious epic given to Italy by his own son.

Torquato was born in 1544, at the beautifully situated town of Sorrento, on the southern shore of the Bay of Naples; but, his father having been involved in the misfortunes and exile of a distinguished patron, the son's education was conducted in the north. At Padua, when he had scarcely completed his eighteenth year, he published his romantic poem called Rinaldo, which, aided by other compositions, soon spread his fame over the peninsula, and introduced him into the service of the house of Este, princes of Ferrara. His next work of importance was the Aminta, a pastoral drama, in which, although having no claim to rank as the inventor of that faulty species of poetry, he exhibited it in a height of excellence neither attained before nor since. But, in the midst of studies, minor compositions, and travels which carried him as far as Paris, his mind was mainly occupied in elaborating his great work, the "Gierusalemme Liberata," which he had planned and partly executed before leaving the university. Though the youthful sketch is still extant, the work was afterwards rewritten, and did not reach its close till 1575. The poet, now more than thirty years old, had already displayed those infirmities of character which made him, during the remainder of his life, the helpless victim of envious enemies, or of mean and heartless patrons. The tale which Goethe and Byron have made the theme of poetical invention, represents Tasso as the lover of Leonora d'Este, or, according to some biographers, of Lucretia her sister; but the story is neither sufficiently vouched, nor in itself either probable or consistent; and the real cause of the persecution to which he was subjected remains, after all investigations, as obscure as ever. We know, however, enough to show that his mind was but ill qualified to stand the shock and tumult of the world. That exquisite sensibility which reigns in his poetry was never dormant in any action of his life: deficient in moral courage, and acutely sensitive in taste, he hesitated for years to give his great poem to the public; his imagination, overwrought and undisciplined, filled him with exaggerated suspicions of all who were around him, and superstitious terrors completed his misery. He surrendered himself to the Inquisition, confessing, as heretical doubts, what the inquisitors had sense enough to consider as illusions of hypochondria; and, after an unlucky quarrel had brought on him a temporary imprisonment at Ferrara, he fled secretly from that city in 1577, and, crossing the central Appenines by unfrequented paths, sought refuge with his sister at Sorrento. For a year and a half after this period he wandered through Italy, alternately abandoning himself to fanciful despondence, and arousing his mind to the composition of some of his minor works. In 1579, returning to Ferrara for the second time since his flight, he was treated with neglect by the duke and his sisters, and insulted by the retainers of the court: he broke out, it is said, into violent reproaches against his alienated patrons; and, seized by order of the Duke Alfonso, he was immured in the hospital of Sant' Anna, a public madhouse. In this prison he remained more than seven years, receiving at one time permission to see his friends, and even to pay visits in the city, but treated during the greater part of the period with all the severities which in those days fell to the lot of ordinary maniacs. In the earlier years of his imprisonment, his mind seems to have gathered, from solitude and reflection, a strength of resolution which it had not before possessed, while his literary genius was undecayed and constantly active; but at length the horrors of his situation increased his constitutional tendency to mental disease, and there is little ground for doubting that, in the later period of his confinement, he laboured under a partial alienation of reason.

At length, however, the solicitation of powerful friends procured his release, which took place in 1586; and, although his after years present us with several stories of new misfortune and neglect, he found some patrons both kind and judicious. His Jerusalem Delivered had been published repeatedly during his imprisonment, in spite of his earnest enthusiasm and from the wish to flatter princes, he rewrote the whole poem, and published it anew at Rome in 1562, under the title of the "Gierusalemme Conquistata." In this altered shape the work was a religious allegory, and the Ferrarese princes were never named in it; but the original editions of the poem have kept their place in general favour, and the alteration is universally and not unjustly neglected. Except the tragedy of Torrismondo, all his other extensive compositions after his release were of a devotional cast. In the spring of 1595, while preparations were making for conferring on him the honours of that triumphal coronation in the Roman capitol, which had been invented in favour of Petrarcha, he felt that his end was approaching, and retired to the convent of Saint Onofrio on the brow of the Janiculan Mount. He there expired placidly, having just completed his fifty-first year; and his body still lies beneath the pavement of the little church.

Tasso's works are very numerous, both in prose and verse; and recent examinations of libraries, both in Italy and France, especially that of Allier, now preserved at Montpellier, have added to the list many pieces, though without throwing any decisive light on the mysterious portions of his history. One of the most curious of the discoveries is a "Discorso intorno alla Sedizione nata nel regno di Francia," which was published in an Italian periodical in 1817. It was written during his residence of twelve months at Paris, and is a bigoted argument for the use of extreme severities against the Huguenots. This performance, with other treatises and letters, was reprinted by the Abate Mazzucchelli in 1822. Rosini's edition of the poet's works contains a volume exclusively devoted to letters and poems not previously published; and several separate collections have appeared, the most important being the "Trattato della Dignità ed altri Scritti," by Gazzera (Turin, 1838), and the "Manoscritti inediti" of Count Alberti (Lucca, 1837-8).

Tasso's prose dialogues and moral treatises, and his minor works in general, have scarcely received, even from his own countrymen, that attention which they fairly deserve; and Monti had some reason for declaring, that the poet's shade has been appeased but in part for the insults offered to him in his lifetime by Salviati and the other academicians of the Crusca. Many of his lyrics are exceedingly beautiful, and none of them more so than those gems which stand as choruses in the Torrismondo, atoning by their pathetic sweetness for a bad plot and a want of all dramatic vigour in the tragedy itself. But the Jerusalem Delivered will always continue to be its author's title to immortality; and, whatever its faults may be, there are assuredly no two epics of modern times that deserve to be placed above it. Regarded in comparison with other chivalrous poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, it distinguishes itself by two prominent features; its perfect regularity and simplicity of plan, and its lofty and single seriousness of temper. No preceding poem in the language had both these qualities; and Ariosto's, the masterpiece of the series, and in some respects the masterpiece of modern Italian literature, was possessed of neither. The completeness of finishing in the Gierusalemme is another excellence, in which it stands perhaps higher than any poetical work that has been composed since the days of Virgil: and the antithetical quibbles and plays upon words which descended from the Troubadours to Petrarcha, from Petrarcha to Tasso, and from Tasso (though not through him directly) to our own poets of the Elizabethan age, are faults more than balanced by the chivalrous sentiment, the picturesqueness of natural descriptions, the fanciful beauty of the supernatural machinery, and the tenderness which so often melts into irresistible pathos. We must not look, in that picture of the Crusades which Tasso has painted, for the stern and vigorous truth which such a mind as Shakspeare's would have incorporated in essential harmony with the poetical elements; we must not look even for that inferior kind of fidelity to historical features which gives so strong a charm to some poems of our own time; but we must view in it, with thankful admiration, a panorama of poetically romantic incident, and poetically chivalrous character, as delightful as anything which genius has ever presented.