under the yoke of the Medici, whom he denounced as tyrants.  The Academy, which at the time enjoyed the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was therefore too glad to seize upon Pellegrini’s squib as a pretext for a vehement attack upon Tasso’s epic.  Ariosto was dead, had passed among the immortals, and was therefore beyond all envy; but here was a living poet, who belonged to a court which had cruelly treated the daughter of their ruler, Lucrezia de Medici, the first wife of Alfonso of Ferrara, and was a mere youth, who was guilty of the sacrilege of seeking to dethrone their favourite.  Ariosto had greatly admired Florence, and celebrated its beauties in one of his finest poems; and was it to be borne that this young upstart, who had presumed to speak disparagingly of their city, should be preferred to him?  It would be a useless waste of time to go over in detail the absurd criticisms by which they attempted to throw ridicule upon the Gerusalemme Liberata.  They would have passed into utter oblivion had not Tasso himself, by condescending to reply to them, given to them an immortality of shame.  Not contented with abusing his poem and himself, they also attacked his father, asserting that his Amadigi was a most miserable work, and was pillaged wholesale from the writings of others, and thus wounded the poet in the most tender part.

By this combination of critical cavils against him, Tasso was thrown back from the land of poetical vision into a dreary mental wilderness.  The effect upon one of his most sensitive nature, predisposed by temperament and the vicissitudes of his life to profound melancholy, was most disastrous.  We can trace to this cause the commencement of those mental disorders which, if they never reached actual insanity, bordered upon it, and darkened the rest of his life.  His overwrought mind gave way to all kinds of morbid fancies.  His body became enfeebled by the agitation of his mind; and the powerful medicines which he was prevailed upon to take to cure his troubles only increased them.  Like Rousseau during his sad visit to England, he became suspicious of every one, and lost faith even in himself.  Religious doubts commenced to agitate his mind.  Distracted by this worst of all evils, he put himself into the hands of the Holy Fraternity at Bologna; and though the inquisitors had sense enough to see that what he considered atheistical doubts were only the illusions of hypochondria, and tried to reassure him as to their belief in the soundness of his faith, he was not satisfied with the absolution which they had given to him.