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His corpse was interred the same evening in the church of the monastery, according to his will; and his tomb was covered with a plain stone, on which, ten years after, Manso, his friend and admirer, caused this simple epitaph to be engraved Hic Jacet Torquatus Tasso. By JOSEPH FORSTER Cervantes, the Shakespeare of Spain, led a life of the most romantic and adventurous kind.
Accordingly there here follow the encomiums of his various Italian friends, known to us long ago, and which had been carefully preserved by him till now among his papers the Latin distich by the famous Marquis Manso of Naples; the outrageously complimentary Latin verses of the two Romans, Salzilli and Selvaggi; and the more interesting Italian ode of compliment and Latin Dedication by the two Florentines, Francini and Carlo Dati.
Milton only tells us himself that the antiquities detained him in Rome about two months. At the end of November he went on to Naples. On the road he fell in with an Eremite friar, who gave him an introduction to the one man in Naples whom it was important he should know, Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa.
He painted their bodies with the black lustrous powder of iron and manganese ore which is believed to strike terror into the hearts of enemies. He selected their leader, invested him with the office, and blessed the war-fetiches. To the leader he gave a little bag of buckskin filled with the powder of the yerba del manso, which still further produces dismay among the foe.
In spite of his years, he was able to act as cicerone to the young Englishman over the scenes which he himself, in his Life of Tasso, has described with the enthusiasm of a poet. But even the high-souled Manso quailed before the terrors of the Inquisition, and apologised to Milton for not having shown him greater attention, because he would not be more circumspect in the matter of religion.
If it were not for the haze in the horizon to-day, I could distinguish the very house in Naples that of Manso, Marquis of Villa, where Tasso found a home, and where John Milton was entertained at a later day by that hospitable nobleman.
He educated his generation up to himself, giving to the taste and to the judgment of his contemporaries a decided trend, so that his merits have already been sufficiently recognized, appraised, and even portrayed. In many a work on German literature he is discussed as honorably as judiciously; I need only recall the laudations which Küttner, Eschenburg, Manso, and Eichhorn have bestowed upon him.
He now took up his abode in another monastery, that of San Severino, where he was comforted by the visits of his friend Manso, to whom he had lately inscribed a dialogue on Friendship; for he continued writing to the last.
What more natural than to have sent copies of such a volume to the various Italian friends named in it, to remind them of the Englishman to whom they had been so kind. The venerable Manso, indeed, was by this time dead; Salzilli seems to have been dead; the great Galileo, whom Milton had at least once visited near Florence, had died in 1642; but most of the Florentine group were still alive.
Milton's acquaintance with Manso may be regarded as one of the most fortunate incidents of his foreign travels, inasmuch as his conversations about Tasso are supposed to have suggested to him the design of writing an epic work like the Gerusalemme; and indeed Milton is supposed to have borrowed some of his ideas for Paradise Lost from the Sette Giornate, or Seven Days of Creation, a fragmentary poem in blank verse, which Tasso began under the roof of his friend at Naples.
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