For a poet to be independent in that age of intellectual servitude was well-nigh impossible.

To be light-hearted and ironically indifferent lay not in Tasso's temperament.

It was no less difficult for a man of his mental education to maintain the balance between orthodoxy and speculation, faith and reason, classical culture and Catholicism, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.

He belonged in one sense too much, and in another sense too little, to his epoch.

One eminent critic calls him the only Christian of the Italian Renaissance, another with equal justice treats him as the humanistic poet of the Catholic Revival.[83] Properly speaking, he was the genius of that transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation, on which I dwelt in the second chapter of this work.