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"When I was at Naples, I went with Signor Manso, a gentleman of excellent parts and breeding, who had been the familiar friend of that famous poet Torquato Tasso, to see the burning mountain Vesuvius.
It would seem as though this sea of verdure stretched forth an arm from the basin of Buenos Ayres, by the Llanos of Tucuman, Manso, Chuco, the Chiquitos, and the Moxos, to the Pampas del Sacramento and the savannahs of Napo, Guaviare, Meta and Apure.
Among the visitors who sought him out in this retreat was John Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa, who afterwards became his biographer. This accomplished nobleman, "whose name the friendship and Latin hexameters of Milton have rendered at once familiar and musical to English ears," was by far the kindest and most consistent patron that Tasso ever met with.
Manso has left a collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings a suspicious amount, and unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of them is traceable to some other man. They come from the Greek and Latin philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus.
TASSO'S conversation, which his friend Manso has attempted to preserve for us, was not agreeable.
This was followed two years later by the return of Bishop Manso to San Juan, armed with the dreadful powers of General Inquisitor of the Indies and by the nomination of licentiate Antonio de la Gama as judge auditor of the accounts of Sancho Velasquez.
Guarini's comment on the Aminta in his letter to Speroni has been already quoted: it does little credit to the writer. Manso, the companion and biographer of Tasso, records that, the poet being asked by some friends what he thought of the Pastor fido, a copy of which had lately found its way to him at Naples: Et egli, 'Mi piace sopramodo, ma confesso di non saper la cagione perchè mi piaccia. Onde io rispondendogli, 'Vi piacer
"On the second day, having crossed a river and come to a village which, if I remember, was called Manso, we bore away southward among the most horrible mountains. Among these we wandered four days, relying always on Sir John's map: but I reckon the man who made it must have drawn the track out of his own head and trusted that no person would ever be fool enough to go there.
I wondered how the peasants could venture to dwell so fearlessly and cheerfully on its sides, when the lava was flowing from its summit; but Manso smiled, and told me that when the fire descends freely they retreat before it without haste or fear.
He was so entirely freed from his fears of the Inquisition and of charges of magic, that whereas he had formerly been anxious to shew that he meant nothing but a poetical fancy by the spirit which he introduced as communing with him in his dialogue entitled the Messenger, he now maintained its reality against the arguments of his friend Manso; and these arguments gave rise to the most poetical scene in his history.
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