T A S 95 



numerous, and many of them exquisite both in languag 

 and sentiment. Besides those which are upon amorou 

 subjects, some refer to contemporary events, or are i 

 praise of contemporary princes ; others are upon religiou 

 subjects ; and others refer to his own misfortunes. Th 

 whole of Tasso's poetical works have been published i 

 one large 8vo. vol. of nearly 1000 pages, in double column) 

 at Venice, 1833. Prefixed to it is the biography of th 

 author, by his friend the Marquis Manso. 



Tasso's prose works consist of dialogues and disserta 

 tions, some of which have been already noticed ; of t 

 treatise upon epic poetry, dedicated to Cardinal Pietrc 

 Aldobiandini ; discourses upon the poetical art, dedicatee 

 to Scipione Gonzatta ; and of numerous letters, some o 

 which have remained unpublished till lately, ' Lettere 

 Inedite,' Pisa, 1827. Professor Rosini has edited a new 

 edition of all the works of Tasso, begun at Pisa in 1820. 



Tamo's ' Gerusalemme Liberata' has been translatec 

 into most European languages. There are English transla- 

 tions by Fairfax, Hoole, Broadhead, Hunt, and Wiffen. It 

 has also been paraphrased into several Italian dialects, 

 Milanese, Neapolitan, Calabrian, &e. The Life of Tasso 

 has been written by Manso, Serassi, and others, and has 

 been commented upon by Tiraboschi, Muratori, Zeno, 

 Maft'ei, and other Italian philologists. 



TASSO'NI, ALESSA'NDRO, born of a noble family at 

 Modena, in 1505, was educated first in his native town, and 

 afterwards at Bologna and Ferrara, where he studied the 

 law. In 1597 he went to Rome, when he entered the service 

 ardinal Ascanio Colonna, whom he accompanied to 

 Spain in the year 1600. In 1603 the cardinal, having been 

 made viceroy of Aragon, sent Tassoni to Rome to take 

 -TO of the administration of his property in Italy. 

 During his stay in Spain Tassoni had opportunities of observ- 

 ing the internal state of that kingdom, which, after alarm- 

 ing all Europe in the preceding century by its ambition 

 and the extent of its conquests, was now fast sinking into 

 decay under the weak reign of Philip III. At Rome he 

 wrote his Considerazioni sopra il Petrarca,' published in 

 ]U<)!l, in which he commented very severely upon numer- 

 nilts, real or supposed, which he pointed out in the 

 writings of that generally admired poet. Endowed with 

 an inquisitive but somewhat captious mind, Tassoni aimed 

 in his writings at opposing received opinions, and he em- 

 ployed sarcasm and ridicule for the purpose. Aromatari 

 of ASMM took up the defence of Petrarch in his ' Risposte' 

 to Taaooni'e considerations, and this led to a controversy in 

 the usual bitter style of Italian literary polemics. In 1612 

 ni published his ' Pensieri Diversi' in ten books, being 

 a collection of remarks on various subjects of science and 

 literature which he had been in the habit for years of 

 nig in his memorandum-book. Among other subjects 

 he attacked the Physics of Aristotle, although he does not 

 to have had himself very correct notions of physical 

 phenomena. This work led to another controversy between 

 ii and ^e\eral of his contemporaries. Meantime the 

 nial Colonna had died, and Tassoni, being now without 

 employment, applied to Charles Emmanuel I., duke of 

 Savoy, who promised him the post of secretary to his son, 

 the cardinal of Savoy. But partly through court intrigues, 

 and partly on account of Tassoni's known aversion to the 

 court of Spain, with which the Duke of Saxony wished to 

 bv mi good terms, be was kept waiting for years before 

 he could take possession of his office at the court of the 

 cardinal, who was then residing at Rome. Certain com- 

 po-iiions entitled 'Filippiche,' in which the court of Spain 

 ly handled, as well as another pamphlet entitled 

 iuie della Monarchia di Spagna,' which appeared 

 (liii-inir that period, were generally attributed to Tassoni. 

 TiiaU,,clii thinks that the first two of the ' Filippiche' are 

 ni's. but that the other five are by another pen. 

 C.)|,i, , u| this work are very scarce. In 1623 Tassoni left 

 the cardinal of Savoy in disgust, and retired to a country- 

 in the suburb of Transtevero, where he employed 

 himself in study and rural occupation*. About this time 

 I his portrait taken with the rind of a fig in his hand 

 and the following di^ich written underneath: 



Dexter.i cur ficum qiurris mea gpstct itianfin ?. 

 <>[ieris mercea hc filit : nuladedit.' 



In K;2' Cardinal Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory 



XV., took Tassoni into his service, and gave him apart- 



: . ill his own palace, with a handsome stipend. After 



the cardinal's death, in 1032, Tassoni repaired to Modena, 



T A S 



when he was made councillor to his sovereign Duke 



Francis I. of Este, for the remainder of his life He diet 



at Modena in 1635. 

 Besides the works already mentioned, Tassoni made an 



abridgment in Italian of the ' Annals' of Baronius and 

 some ' Annotazioni,' or corrections and additions to the 

 Italian vocabulary of La Crusca. But the work for which 

 he is best known is his mock-heroic poem, ' La Secchia 

 Rapita,' or the ' Rape of a Bucket.' He is considered as 

 having first introduced this kind of composition in the 

 Italian language, as he had finished, though not published 

 in print, his poem years before his contemporary Brac- 

 ciolini published, in 1618, his ' Scherno degli Dei,' in which 

 he turns into ridicule the gods of the antient mythology 

 Tassoni's poem was published in a printed form in 1622,' 

 but MS. copies had been in circulation long before. The' 

 subject is taken from the annals of his country under the 

 year 1249, when a war having broken out between the two 

 neighbouring cities of Modena and Bologna, the Modenese 

 carried off in triumph a wooden bucket from within one of 

 the gates of Bologna, which bucket is still seen suspended 

 by a chain in the cathedral of Modena. The ' Secehia 

 Rapita' has been generally admired by Italian as well as 

 foreign critics. Voltaire speaks of it disparagingly, although 

 IB has borrowed from it (Valery, Voyages Littcraires), 

 Jut Perrault and other French critics have done Tassoni 

 full justice. The humour of the poem is peculiarly Italian, 

 and the admixture of the serious and heroic with the bur- 

 esque is happily combined. Some of the descriptive pas- 

 sages are exquisitely soft and true to nature, such as the song 

 n canto viii. which begins : ' Dormiva Endimion tra 

 'erbe e i fiori,' and the beautiful episode in canto x. of 

 he voyage of Venus from the mouth of the Arno to 

 Naples for the purpose of engaging Manfred, son of Fre- 

 deric II., to assist the Guibelines of North Italy. The 



Secchia Rapita' has gone through numerous editions: 

 hat of Barotti, Modena, 1744, is most splendid. Gironi 

 has collected various judgments and comments upon this 

 poem in his biography of Tassoni. Muratori has also 

 vritten the Life of Tassoni. 



(Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Ilaliana; Corniani, 

 Secoli della Letteratura Italiana ; Zeno, Note al Fonta- 

 tnt.) 



TASTE. The organs of this special sense are certain 

 larts within the cavity of the mouth, obviously so disposed 

 is to take early cognizance of matters about to be swal- 

 owed, and to act as sentinels for the remainder of the ali- 

 icntary canal, at the entrance of which they are situated, 

 'heir special endowment, aided by an exquisite develop- 

 ment of common sensibility, enables them to give timely 

 otice of any acrid, caustic, or nauseous quality, of any 

 ndue temperature, of any inconvenient hardness, irregu- 

 irity, size, or sharpness in the material submitted to them, 

 ml thus to protect the stomach against the intrusion of 

 many hurtful agents. These organs moreover establish 

 or our appetites a scale of liking and disliking : they 

 iperadd a discriminative pleasure to the enforced assua- 

 Ting of hunger : they modify that merely quantitative inges- 

 on, which is an absolute and daily need of the organism, 

 ith a qualitative choice, and so give a motive to those; 

 ariations in diet which experience proves to be beneficial 

 r necessary. 



Common language (as in the word ' palatable') seems to 

 :tribute the sense exclusively to a part, which is by no 

 leans the only or chief seat of it. In order to give a more 

 orrect notion of its extent, we shall first briefly sketch the 

 rrangement of the membrane which lines the cavity of 

 ic mouth. It is a continuation (a tubular folding in, as it 

 ere, through the aperture of the lips) of the general in- 

 !gument, the skin ; and although somewhat changed in its 

 i characters, it yet preserves, under the name of mucous 

 lembrane, a close resemblance to the parent tissue. It 

 nes the inside of the cheeks, invests the alveoli, or gums, 

 nving to these parts their polished smoothness of surface, 



reflected from the lower alveolar arches to the tongue, 

 om the upper alveolar arches to the palate, and from. 

 oth these organs prolonged backward into the throat, 

 n its palatine portion, the membrane covers the horizontal 

 rocesses of the upper jaw, which divide the cavity of the 

 onth from that, of the nose, and, while spread on this 

 ilid frame-work, is said to belong to the hard palate ; and 



likewise extends backward, beyond the limits of this 

 ony partition, to form a pendulous flap, called the soft 



