Alas! the very circumstance to which he looked for success, tended to throw him into the greatest of his calamities.  Alfonso was to be married the day after the poet’s arrival.  He was therefore too busy to attend to him.  The princesses did not attend to him.  Nobody attended to him.  He again applied in vain for his papers.  He regretted his return; became anxious to be any where else; thought himself not only neglected but derided; and at length became excited to a pitch of frenzy.  He broke forth into the most unmeasured invectives against the duke, even in public; invoked curses on his head and that of his whole race; retracted all he had ever said in the praise of any of them, prince or otherwise; and pronounced him and his whole court “a parcel of ingrates, rascals, and poltroons."[12] The outbreak was reported to the duke; and the consequence was, that the poet was sent to the hospital of St. Anne, an establishment for the reception of the poor and lunatic, where he remained (with the exception of a few unaccountable leave-days) upwards of seven years.  This melancholy event happened in the March of the year 1579.

Tasso was stunned by this blow as much as if he had never done or suffered any thing to expect it.  He could at first do nothing but wonder and bewail himself, and implore to be set free.  The duke answered, that he must be cured first.  Tasso replied by fresh entreaties; the duke returned the same answers.  The unhappy poet had recourse to every friend, prince, and great man he could think of, to join his entreaties; he sought refuge in composition, but still entreated; he occasionally reproached and even bantered the duke in some of his letters to his friends, all of which, doubtless, were opened; but still he entreated, flattered, adored, all to no purpose, for seven long years and upwards.  In time he became subject to maniacal illusions; so that if he was not actually mad before, he was now considered so.  He was not only visited with sights and sounds, such as many people have experienced whose brains have been over-excited, but he fancied himself haunted by a sprite, and become the sport of “magicians.”  The sprite stole his things, and the magicians would not let him get well.  He had a vision such as Benvenuto Cellini had, of the Virgin Mary in her glory; and his nights were so miserable, that he ate too much in order that he might sleep.  When he was temperate, he lay awake.  Sometimes he felt “as if a horse had thrown himself on him.”  “Have pity on me,” he says to the friend to whom he gives these affecting accounts; “I am miserable, because the world is unjust."[13]