Notes to Chapter 148 Evelyn, Diary, II, 146.
49 Tasso (1544–95) wrote his pastoral drama L’Aminta (Ferrara, 1581, first performed 1573)
and his great epic Gerusalemme Liberata (Rome, 1581) under the patronage of the Duke
of Ferrara. Then melancholy, religious torments of conscience, the Inquisition, and his
frantic passion for the duke’s sister, Leonora d’Este, led the duke to imprison him as a
lunatic. After his release he remained subject to bouts of mental illness for the rest of his
life. From 1588 till his death in 1595 he lived from time to time with Manso. His later
publications include Di Gerusalemme Conquistata (Rome, 1593), Il Manso, ovvero
Dell’Amicitia (Naples, 1596), and Le Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato (Viterbo, 1607).
50 L’Adone (Paris, 1623); La strage degl’innocenti (Naples [1632]). Marino was also Tasso’s
successor in lyric and pastoral; his other volumes include L’Epitalami (Paris, 1616), La
Galeria (Milan, 1620), and La Sampogna (Paris, 1620).
51 Manso’s Vita di Torquato Tasso (Naples, 1619) was reprinted twice at Venice and in
1634 at Rome. Milton refers to a life of Marino by Manso but there is no record of it.
Manso also wrote five dialogues on love, Paradossi, ovvero dell’Amore Dialoghi (Milan,
1608), in each of which Tasso is a speaker; and another set of dialogues on Love and
Beauty, L’Erocallia dell’Amore e della Bellezza (Venice, 1618). His sonnets and canzoni,
Poesie Nomiche... divise in Rime Amorose, Sacre, e Morali (Venice, 1635) are chiefly in
the affected style of Marino.
52 Masson, I, 811–12.
53 In Epitaphium Damonis, 181, Milton refers to these gifts as “pocula” – cups – employing
the pastoral convention of rewards in shepherds’ singing contests and the Renaissance
convention of referring to poems as imaginary cups. See Michele De Filippis, “Milton
and Manso: Cups or Books,” PMLA 51 (1936), 745–56; and Variorum I, 318; Haan,
From Academia to Amicitia, 119, suggests that the books were likely the Erocallia and the
Poesie Nomiche.
54 Poemata, p. 4, in Poems, 1645: “Ut mens, forma, decor, facies, mos, si pietas sie, / Non
Anglus, verum herclè Angelus ipse fores.” See Haan, From Academia to Amicitia, 130–6.
55 Poemata, p. 72, in Poems, 1645: “Joannes Baptista Mansus Marchio Villensis vir ingenii
laude, tum literarum studio, nec non & bellica virtute apud Italos clarus in primis est.
Ad quem Torquati Tassi dialogus extat de Amicitia scriptus... Is authorem Neapoli
commorantem summa benevolentia prosecutus est, multaque ei detulit humanitatis officia.
Ad hunc itaque hospes ille antequam ab ea urbe discederet, ut ne ingratum se ostenderet,
hoc carmen misit.” Trans. Haan, From Academia to Amicitia, 190–1.
56 Wotton had promised to send along news “in any part where I shall understand you
fixed” (CPW I, 343).
57 We cannot be sure when and where Milton had this news – perhaps as late as Venice or,
less likely, not until he visited Diodati’s uncle in Switzerland. Parker (I, 174–5; II, 826–
7) speculates that he heard the news in Naples and that it helped him decide to revise his
travel plans. See also Parker’s “Milton and the News of Charles Diodati’s Death,” Mod-
ern Language Notes 71 (1957), 486–8.
58 Among them Fynes Moryson, William Lithgow, and Edward Herbert, whose reports
on their “escape from Rome” took on the character of an identifiable genre. Milton
couches his story in these same terms, wishing, perhaps, to defuse criticism that his long
sojourn among the Italian Catholics might invite. See Diana Benet, “The Escape from
Rome,” in Milton in Italy, ed. Di Cesare, 42–4, and Collinson-Morley, Italy after the
Notes to Chapter 4