His style, which can be eloquent to the highest degree, is more commonly easy and "savoury" full, that is to say, of colour and character. His amplifications, and his constant use of quotations, his lawless wanderings away from his subject, and then through many turnings back to it-when he has a subject at all—his amazing indiscretions concerning his health, his morals, and his family history, his frequent sudden appeals to the reader, as of one speaking in confidence and on the spur of the moment, make up a combination which cannot be defined in its inexhaustible variety. It is not the least charm of the Essays that they invite desultory reading. If advice in this matter were ever of much value, we might recommend the reader who has Montaigne to begin, to start with the "Apologie for Raymond of Sebonde," which will give him the whole spirit and way of thinking, and then to read as accident dictates. Orderly study is quite unnecessary with an author who starts from no premiss to arrive at no conclusion, whose unity is due not to doctrine but to character, and who "rays out curious observations on life" all illuminated by a vast learning and by humour. The teaching of Montaigne was expounded by Pierre Charron (1541-1603), a lawyer, who took Charron and orders, and had written against the League Du Vair. and the Protestants, before he fell under the influence of the author of the Essays. His most famous or rather, his one surviving - work, the Traité de la Sagesse (1601),1 is a restatement in more 1 Ed. Amaury Duval, 1828. Charron scholastic form of the ideas of Montaigne. also drew largely, for he was not by any means an original writer, on Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621). Du Vair, who is considered one of the best prosewriters of his time, was the author of many treatises on philosophical subjects; but he is remembered mainly for his famous Suasion, or plea for the Salic Law, delivered before the Estates summoned by the League in 1593. He represented the magistracy, and it is said that his argument persuaded the Estates to reject the candidature of the Infanta of Spain, who had been brought forward by the extreme Catholic party as rival to Henry IV. 1 Euvres Complètes, 1641. 352 CHAPTER XII. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY-TORQUATO TASSO-HIS WORK-THE 6 GERUSALEMME LIBERATA'-GIORDANO BRUNO-LITERARY CHARACTER OF HIS WORK-GIAMBATTISTA GUARINI. THE Later Renaissance, which was so great in Spain and in England, and in France was important, was elsewhere a time of decline, of silence, or of very faint beginnings. The literature of Germany has been broken into periods of vigour, with long intervals of silence between. The second half of the sixteenth century was one of these. Among the smaller peoples, with Holland at their head, there was as yet little more than the attempt to produce literature. The case of Italy was more fortunate than that of Germany. She at least can count two of her most interesting sons among the men of letters of this time, Tasso and Bruno. But here the decadence had begun, and had made no small progress towards the sheer dexterous futility which was to be personified in Marini. The spirit of the Renaissance was The Later Renaissance in Italy. worn out, and was replaced by mere accomplishment, and by the nervous fear which is visible all through the life of Tasso. The Roman Catholic reaction was not favourable to literature. It brought with it the tyranny, or at least the predominance, of a religion which could no longer inspire. The Popes of the time endeavoured to make Rome moral by methods which might have commended themselves to the strictest sect of the Puritans; and commendable as this effort to restrain the licence of the earlier Renaissance and the period. of the Italian wars may have been, still it was an example of the attempt to repress which was being made everywhere in Italy, and which succeeded, since it had only to deal with men of a weak generation. Giordano Bruno was, indeed, indisciplined enough; but he spent the active part of his life out of Italy, and when he did return, his fate was a severe warning against independence of character. Torquato Tasso. The life of Torquato Tasso is of itself enough to show under what a gloomy cloud literature had to work in Italy all through the later sixteenth century. It was a life of dependence, and was dominated by fear-fear of rivals, of envy, of accusations of heresy, and even of murder. That this fear was not quite sane in Tasso's case is true; but though his contemporaries saw it to be unfounded, they do not seem to have thought it absurd. He was born in 1544, the third son of Bernardo Tasso of Bergamo, who was secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno. His mother was Porzia de Rossi, a Ꮓ lady of a distinguished Neapolitan family. Bernardo Tasso, who was himself a verse-writer, and who gained some fame in his time as the author of a long epic founded on the Amadis of Gaul, was compelled to fly when his patron was driven from his principality of Salerno. Porzia, his wife, was detained in Naples by her family, which was meanly anxious not to pay her dowry. She died without again seeing her husband, but the young Torquato was allowed to return to his father. Bernardo, who found a refuge in the service of the Dukes of Urbino, sent his son to the famous legal university of Padua. Here Torquato read, but not at the law, and wrote his epic poem the Rinaldo-little to the satisfaction of his father, who, though a verse - writer himself, wished his son to qualify for a lucrative trade. But the son was resolved to be a poet, and not a lawyer, which decision brought with it the absolute necessity of finding a patron. The Cardinal Luigi d'Este introduced him. to the Court of Ferrara. Tasso had already begun his Jerusalem Delivered and his play of Torrismondo, and had written his Discourses on Epic Poetry. Alphonso II. d'Este, the Duke of Ferrara, received him, and seems to have treated him in the main with great kindness. The story of Tasso's stay at this typical Italian Court, of his passion for Leonora d'Este, of the Duke's discovery, and of the false accusation of madness, on which the poet was imprisoned for years, is one of the best known romances of literary history; but that it is a romance there can be no doubt. From his early |