The physicians advised him to leave off wine; but he says he could not do that, though he was content to use it in moderation.  In truth he required something to support him against the physicians themselves, for they continued to exhaust his strength by their medicines, and could not supply the want of it with air and freedom.  He had ringings in the ears, vomits, and fluxes of blood.  It would be ludicrous, if it were not deplorably pathetic, to hear so great a man, in the commonest medical terms, now protesting against the eternal drenches of these practitioners, now humbly submitting to them, and now entreating like a child, that they might at least not be “so bitter.”  The physicians, with the duke at their head, were as mad for their rhubarbs and lancets as the quacks in Moliere; and nothing but the very imagination that had nearly sacrificed the poet’s life to their ignorance could have hindered him from dashing his head against the wall, and leaving them to the execrations of posterity.  It is the only occasion in which the noble profession of medicine has not appeared in wise and beneficent connexion with the sufferings of men of letters.  Why did Ferrara possess no Brocklesby in those days? no Garth, Mead, Warren, or Southwood Smith?

Tasso enabled himself to endure his imprisonment with composition.  He supported it with his poetry and his poem, and what, alas! he had been too proud of during his liberty, the praises of his admirers.  His genius brought him gifts from princes, and some money from the booksellers:  it supported him even against his critics.  During his confinement the Jerusalem Delivered was first published; though, to his grief, from a surreptitious and mutilated copy.  But it was followed by a storm of applause; and if this was succeeded by as great a storm of objection and controversy, still the healthier part of his faculties were roused, and he exasperated his critics and astonished the world by shewing how coolly and learnedly the poor, wild, imprisoned genius could discuss the most intricate questions of poetry and philosophy.  The disputes excited by his poem are generally supposed to have done him harm; but the conclusion appears to be ill founded.  They diverted his thoughts, and made him conscious of his powers and his fame.  I doubt whether he would have been better for entire approbation:  it would have put him in a state of elevation, unfit for what he had to endure.  He had found his pen his great solace, and he had never employed it so well.  It would be incredible what a heap of things he wrote in this complicated torment of imprisonment, sickness, and “physic,” if habit and mental activity had not been sufficient to account for much greater wonders.  His letters to his friends and others would make a good-sized volume; those to his critics, another; sonnets and odes, a third; and his Dialogues after the manner of Plato, two more.  Perhaps a good half of all he wrote was written in this hospital of St. Anne; and he studied