James, modeller, whose history is intimately connected with a branch of the fine arts in Great Britain, was born of obscure parents at Pollockshaws, near Glasgow, about the year 1735. He began life as a country stonemason, without the expectation of ever rising higher. Going to Glasgow on a fair-day, to amuse himself with his companions, at the time when the celebrated printers, Robert and Andrew Foulis, were attempting to establish an academy for the fine arts in that city; he saw their collection of paintings, and felt an irresistible impulse to become a painter. He removed to Glasgow, and in the Foulis' Academy acquired a knowledge of drawing which unfolded and improved his natural taste. Resorting to Dublin for employment, he became known to Dr Quin, who was amusing himself in his leisure hours with endeavouring to imitate antique gems in coloured pastes, and take accurate impressions of the engravings that were on them. Dr Quin, in looking out for an assistant, soon discovered Tassie to be one in whom he could place perfect confidence.

That art was known to the ancients, and many specimens from ancient gems are now in the cabinets of the curious. It seems to have been lost in the middle ages; was revived in Italy under Leo X. and the Medici at Florence; became more perfect in France under the regency of the Duke of Orleans, by his labours and those of Homburg. By those whom they instructed as assistants in the laboratory, the art continued to be practised in Paris, and was carried to Rome. Their art was kept a secret, and their collections were small. It is owing to Quin and to Tassie that the art has been carried to such perfection in Great Britain, and has attracted the attention of Europe.

The doctor committed his laboratory and experiments to his care. The associates were fully successful, and found themselves able to imitate all the gems, and take accurate impressions of the engravings. As the doctor had followed the subject only for his amusement, when the discovery was completed he encouraged Tassie to repair to London, and to devote himself to the preparation and sale of those pastes as his profession. In 1766 Tassie arrived in London. Diffident and modest to excess, he was very unfit to introduce himself to the attentions of persons of rank and affluence; besides, the number of engraved gems in Great Britain was small, and those few were little noticed. Gradually he emerged from obscurity and obtained competence; and, what was to him much more, he was able to increase his collection, and add higher degrees of excellence to his art. His name soon became respected, and the first cabinets in Europe were made accessible to him. He uniformly paid the greatest attention to the exactness of the imitation and accuracy of the engraving; so that many of his pastes were sold on the continent by fraudulent persons for real gems. His fine taste led him to be peculiarly careful of the impression; and he always destroyed those with which he was in the least dissatisfied.

To the ancient gem engravings he added a numerous collection of the most eminent modern ones; many of which approach in excellence of workmanship, if not in simplicity of design and chastity of expression, to the most celebrated of the ancient ones. Many years before he died, he executed for the Empress Catherine II. of Russia a commission consisting of about 15,000 different engravings from gems. At his death, in 1799, they amounted to nearly 20,000—a collection of gem engravings unequalled in the world. Every lover of the fine arts must be sensible of the advantage of such a collection for improvement in knowledge and in taste. The collection of Felixo at Paris consisted of 1800 articles, and that of Dehn at Rome of 2500. In private life Tassie was universally esteemed for his uniform piety, and for the simplicity, modesty, and benevolence that marked his whole character.

James Tassie's nephew, William, carried on the business in London after his uncle's death, and who still survives (June 1860) as an octogenarian. William Tassie has a capital portrait of his uncle, painted by David Allan. During the elder Tassie's life several catalogues of his collection were published. The two most important of these were drawn up by Rudolph Eric Raspe, F.R.S., a German. Their titles are: Account of the Present Arrangement of Mr James Tassie's Collection of Pastes and Impressions, from Ancient and Modern Gems; London 1786; A Descriptive Catalogue of a General Collection of Ancient and Modern Engraved Gems, Cameos, as well as Intaglios, taken from the most celebrated Cabinets in Europe, and cast in Coloured Pastes, White Enamel, and Sulphur, by James Tassie, with Plates. In English and French, London, 1791, 2 vols. 4to. This last is a curious and valuable work. Tasso, 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 latter 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 remonstrances; and now, weaned alike from chivalrous 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 capital, 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 Allieri, 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 Tassoni 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. Tasso's great work has been rendered into most European languages. There are English translations of it by Fairfax, Hoole, Broadhead, Hunt, and Wiffen. The version of Fairfax is one of the very best translations in any language.

Sercasi, *Vita di Torquato Tasso*, Roma, 1785, 4to; Black's *Life of Torquato Tasso*, Edin. 1810, 2 vols. 4to. (w.s.)