England; compulsory education is in vogue; is well supplied
with railways and telegraphs; was formerly called Van Diemen's Land after
Van Diemen, the Dutch governor-general of Batavia, who despatched Tasman
on his voyage of discovery.

TASSO, BERNARDO, an Italian poet of some repute in his own day, but
now chiefly remembered as the father of the greater Torquato, born in
Venice (1493-1569).

TASSO, TORQUATO, an illustrious Italian poet, son of preceding, born
at Sorrento, near Naples; educated at a Jesuit school in Naples, he
displayed unusual precocity, and subsequently studied law at the
university of Padua, but already devoted to poetry, at 18 published his
first poem "Rinaldo," a romance in 12 cantos, the subject-matter of which
is drawn from the Charlemagne legends; in 1566 he entered the service of
Cardinal Luigi d'Este, by whom he was introduced to Alfonso, Duke of
Ferrara, brother of the cardinal, within whose court he received the
needful impulse to begin his great poem "La Gerusalemme Liberata"; for
the court stage he wrote his pastoral play "Aminta," a work of high
poetic accomplishment, which extended his popularity, and by 1575 his
great epic was finished; in the following year the symptoms of mental
disease revealed themselves, and after a confinement of a few days he
fled from Ferrara, and for two years led the life of a wanderer, the
victim of his own brooding, religious melancholy, passing on foot from
city to city of Italy; yielding to a pent-up longing to revisit Ferrara
he returned, but was coldly received by the duke, and after an outburst
of frenzy placed in confinement for seven years; during these years the
fame of his epic spread throughout Italy, and the interest created in its
author eventually led to his liberation; in 1595 he was summoned by Pope
Clement VIII., from a heartless and wandering life, to appear at Rome to
be crowned upon the Capitol the poet-laureate of Italy, but, although he
reached the city, his worn-out frame succumbed before the ceremony could
take place; "One thing," says Settembrini, the literary historian of
Italy, "Tasso had, which few in his time possessed, a great heart, and
that made him a true and great poet, and a most unhappy man;" Fairfax's
translation of the "Jerusalem Delivered" is one of his great
translations in the English language (1544-1595).

TATAR, a word derived from a Turanian root signifying "to pitch a
tent," hence appropriate to nomadic trib