are scientifically
described, and are in entire accordance with the most rigorous rules
of war; and so thoroughly did he make himself acquainted with the
topography of the Holy Land by the aid of books, that Chateaubriand,
who read the _Gerusalemme_ under the walls of Jerusalem, was struck
with the fidelity of the local descriptions. Tasso occasionally sought
relief from his great task by the composition of sonnets and lyrics,
which were published in the Rime of the Paduan Academy, and
contributed to make him still more popular all over Italy. He also
took part in those literary disputations in public which were
characteristic of the age; and for three days in the Academy of
Ferrara, in the presence of the court, defended against both sexes
fifty "Amorous Conclusions" which he had drawn up--a form of
controversy which seems to have been a relic of the courts or
parliaments of love, very popular in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. One of the ladies of the court impugned with success his
twenty-first conclusion "that man loves more intensely and with more
stability than woman;" but whether this success was the result of the
goodness of her cause, and not rather of her own ability or of Tasso's
gallantry, may be left an open question. He afterwards published the
whole series of the "Amorous Conclusions," and dedicated them to
Genevra Malatesta, who now, as an old married woman, was greatly
touched by receiving such a compliment from the son of her former
lover.

Tasso's father was now dying at Ostiglia, a small place on the Po, of
which the Duke of Mantua had made him governor. With talents
unimpaired, at the age of seventy-six, and while preparing a new poem
upon the episode of Floridante in the _Amadigi_, he was seized with
his last illness. His son, full of filial anxiety, hastened to see
him, and found the house in wretched disorder; the servants having
taken advantage of the helplessness of their master to neglect their
duties and steal any valuable property they could lay their hands
upon, so that Tasso had not only to take charge of the household
affairs, but also to defray out of his own scanty resources the
domestic expenditure. After a month's severe struggle his father died
in his arms, to the regret of all Italy, and his remains were interred
with great pomp by the Duke of Mantua in a marble cenotaph in the
principal church of his capital, and were afterwards transferred by
Tasso to the church of St. Pa