totter into the tomb, where rest might possibly be found, Tasso reached Home in November. The ceremony of his coronation was deferred because Cardinal Aldobrandini had fallen ill. But the pope assigned him a pension; and, under the pressure of pontifical remonstrance, Prince Avellino, who held Tasso’s maternal estate, agreed to discharge a portion of his claims by payment of a yearly rent-charge. At no time since Tasso left St Anna had the heavens apparently so smiled upon him. Capitolian honours and money were now at his disposal. Yet this good fortune came too late. It seemed as though fate had decided that this man, in all his weakness of character and pathetic grace of genius, should win the stern fame of martyrdom. Both laurel wreath and wealth must be withdrawn from him. Before the crown was worn or the pensions paid he ascended to the convent of St Onofrio, on a stormy 1st day of April in 1595. Seeing a cardinal’s coach toil up the steep Trasteverine Hill, those good monks came to the door to greet it. From the carriage stepped Tasso, the Odysseus of many wanderings and miseries, the singer of sweetest strains still vocal, and told the prior he was come to die with him.
In St Onofrio he died, on the 25th of April of that year 1595. He was just past fifty-one; and the last twenty years of his existence had been practically and artistically ineffectual. At the age of thirty-one the Gerusalemme, as we have it, was accomplished. The world too was already ringing with the music of Aminta. More than this Tasso had not to give to literature. But those succeeding years of derangement, exile, imprisonment, poverty, and hope deferred endear the man to us. Elegiac and querulous as he must always appear, we yet love Tasso better because he suffered through nearly a quarter of a century of slow decline and unexplained misfortune.
Taken altogether, the best complete edition of Tasso’s writings is that of Rosini (Pisa), in 33 vols. The prose works (in 2 vols., Florence, Le Monnier, 1876) and the letters (in 5 vols., same publishers, 1853) have been admirably edited by Cesare Guasti. This edition of Tasso’s Letters forms by far the most valuable source for his biography. No student can, however, omit to use the romantic memoir attributed to Tasso’s friend Marchese Manso (printed in Rosini’s edition of Tasso’s works above cited), and the important Vita di Torquato Tasso by Serassi (Bergamo, 1790). To give anything like a complete account of more recent critical and biographical Tasso literature is impossible within the limits of this article. (j. a. s.)
TASSONI, Alessandro, Italian poet, was a native of Modena, where he was born in 1565, and where he died in 1635. From 1599 till 1608 he was secretary to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, and in this capacity saw some diplomatic service; he was afterwards employed for some time in similar occupations by Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy. His best-known literary work is a burlesque epic entitled La Secchia Rapita, or “The Rape of the Bucket” (1622), the reference being to a raid of the Modenese upon the people of Bologna in 1325, when a bucket was carried off as a trophy. As in Butler’s Hudibras, many of the personal and local allusions in this poem are now very obscure, and are apt to seem somewhat pointless to the general reader, but, in spite of Voltaire’s contempt, it cannot be neglected by any systematic student of Italian literature (compare vol. xii. p. 512.) Other characteristic works of Tassoni are his Pensieri Diversi (1612), in which he treats philosophical, literary, historical, and scientific questions with unusual freedom, and his Considerazioni sopra il Petrarcha (1609), a piece of criticism showing great independence of traditional views.
TASTE is the sensation referred to the mouth when certain soluble substances are brought into contact with the mucous membrane of that cavity. The sense is located almost entirely in the tongue. Three distinct sensations are referable to the tongue — (1) taste, (2) touch, and (3) temperature. The posterior part of its surface, where there is a Λ-shaped group of large papillæ, called circumvallate papillæ, supplied by the glosso-pharyngeal nerve, and the tip and margins of the tongue, covered with filiform (touch) papillæ and fungiform papillæ, are the chief localities where taste is manifested, but it also exists in the glosso-palatine arch and the lateral part of the soft palate. The middle of the tongue and the surface of the hard palate are devoid of taste. The terminal organs of taste consist of peculiar bodies named taste-bulbs or taste-goblets, discovered by Schwalbe and Lovèn in 1867. They can be most easily demonstrated in the papillæ foliatæ, large oval prominences found on each side near the base of the tongue in the rabbit. Each papilla consists of a series of laminæ or folds, in the sides of which the taste-bodies are readily displayed in a transverse section. Taste-bodies are also found on the lateral aspects of the circumvallate papillæ (see fig. 1), in the fungiform papillæ, in the papillæ of the soft palate and uvula, the under surface of the epiglottis, the upper part of the posterior surface of the epiglottis, the inner sides of the arytenoid cartilages, and even in the vocal cords.
Fig. 1.—Transverse section of a circumvallate papilla: W, the papilla; v, v, the wall in section; R, R, the circular slit or fossa; K, K, the taste-bulbs in position; N, N, the nerves. The figures are from Landois and Stirling’s Physiology.
The taste-bulbs are minute oval bodies, somewhat like an old-fashioned Florence flask, about 1300inch in length by 1800in breadth. Each consists of two sets of cells, — an outer set, nucleated, fusiform, bent like the staves of a barrel, arranged side by side so as to leave a small opening at the apex (the mouth of the barrel), called the gustatory pore; and an inner set, five to ten in number, lying in the centre, pointed at the end next the gustatory pore, and branched at the other extremity.
Fig. 2.— Isolated taste-bulb: D, supporting or protective cells; K, under end; E free end, open, with the projecting apices of the taste cells.
Fig. 3. — isolated protective cell; e, taste-cell.
The branched ends are continuous with non-medullated nerve fibres from the gustatory nerve. These taste-bodies are found in immense numbers: as many as 1760 have been counted on one circumvallate papilla in the ox. They are absent in reptiles and birds. F. E. Schultze states that they exist in the mouth of the tadpole, whilst the tongue of the frog is covered with epithelium resembling that of the gustatory bodies. Leydig has described organs having a similar structure in the skins of fresh water fishes and the tadpole: these may possibly be widely distributed taste-organs. The proofs that these are the terminal organs of taste rest on careful observations which have shown (1) that taste is only experienced when the sapid substance is allowed to come into contact with the taste-body, and that the sense
