But notwithstanding all this magnificence and love of learning, the house of Este, among its other contradictory qualities, was distinguished for capriciousness and meanness.  Even Muratori, their ardent panegyrist, does not attempt to conceal this blemish.  We must deduct a good deal from the high-sounding praise which the courtly writers of Italy bestowed upon this house for its splendid patronage of literature, when we remember that Ariosto, who passed his life in its service, was treated with niggardliness and contempt.  He had a place assigned him among the musicians and jugglers, and was regarded as one of the common domestics of the establishment.  Guarini, the well-known author of the Pastor Fido, contemporary with Tasso, met with much indignity in the service of Alphonso II.; while Panigarola and several other distinguished men were compelled to leave the service of the ducal family by persecution.  Benvenuto Cellini, who resided at the court of Ferrara twenty-five years before Tasso, gives a very unfavourable account of the avarice and rapacity which characterised it; and Serassi, the biographer of Tasso, remarks that the court seems to have been extremely dangerous, especially to literary men.  It was not therefore, we may suppose, without other reasons than his being merely a Guelph, that Dante in his Inferno placed one of the scions of the house in hell, and uniformly regarded the family with dislike.  Tasso himself was destined to experience both the favour and the hostility, the generosity and the neglect, of this capricious house.

Ferrara is now a dull sleepy city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants.  It is a place that continues to exist not because of its vitality, but by the mere force of habit.  Its broad deserted streets and decaying palaces lie silent and sad in the drowsy noon sunshine, like the aisles of a September forest.  But in the days of Tasso it was one of the gayest cities of Italy, which looked upon itself as the centre of the world, and all beyond as mere margin.  It was always festa, always carnival, in Ferrara; and when the poet came to it in his twentieth year, on the last day of October 1565, he found it one brilliant theatre.  The reigning duke, Alphonso II., had just been married to the daughter of Ferdinand I., Emperor of Austria; and this splendid alliance was celebrated by tournaments, balls, feasts, and other pageantry, which transcended everything of the kind that had previously been seen in Italy, with the exception, perhaps, of the fetes connected with the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to his grandfather.  The ardent mind of the poet, it need hardly be said, was completely fascinated.  He saw himself surrounded daily with all the splendours of chivalry, and lived in the midst of scenes such as haunt the dreams of poets and inspire the pages of romance.  Goethe, in his Torquato Tasso, an exquisite poem, it may be said, but wanting in dramatic action, gives a vivid picture of the poet’s life at the court of Ferrara, which bore some resemblance to his own at the court of Weimar.