while a residence, more or less prolonged, in the most famous towns, and among the most romantic scenes of Italy, had widened his mental horizon and expanded his sympathies.  He had already mounted almost to the highest step of the literary ladder.  Nothing could exceed the tokens of respect with which he was everywhere received.  But, in spite of all these advantages, Tasso was now beginning to realise the shadows that accompany even the most splendid literary career.  His own experience was now confirming to him the truth of what his father had often sought to impress upon his mind,—­that the favour of princes was capricious, and that a life of dependence at a court was of all others the most unsatisfactory.  Constitutionally disposed to melancholy, irritable and sensitive to the last degree, he brooded over the fancied wrongs and slights which he had received; and at first he was disposed to accept the advice of his father’s friend, the well-known Sperone, who strongly dissuaded him from going to the court of Ferrara, painting the nature of the life he would lead there in the most forbidding colours.  It would have been well had he listened to this wise counsel, strengthened as it was by his own better judgment; for in that case he might have been spared the mortifications which made the whole of his after life one continued martyrdom.  But recovering from a protracted illness, into which the agitation of his spirits threw him, when on a visit to his father at the court of the Duke of Mantua, he passed from the depths of despondency to the opposite extreme of eagerness, and, fired by ambition, he resolved to enter upon the path to distinction which now opened before him.  And here we come to the crisis of his life.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a state of things existed in Italy somewhat similar to that which existed in the Highlands of Scotland in earlier times.  Each Highland chief maintained an independent court, and among his personal retainers a bard who should celebrate his deeds was considered indispensable.  So was it with the princes of Italy.  In their train was always found a man of letters whose poetic Muse was dedicated to laureate duties, and was valued in proportion as it recorded the triumphs of the protecting court.  For this patronage of art and letters no court was more distinguished than that of Ferrara.

    “Whoe’er in Italy is known to fame,
    This lordly home as frequent guest can claim.”

The family of Este was the most ancient and illustrious in Italy.  The house of Brunswick, from which our own royal family is descended, was a shoot from this parent stock.  It intermarried with the principal reigning families of Europe.  Leibnitz, Muratori, and our own great historian, Gibbon, have traced the lineage and chronicled the family incidents of this ducal house.  Lucrezia Borgia and the Parasina of Byron were members of it.  For several generations the men and women were remarkable for the curious