wandered over almost the whole of Northern Italy, visiting in turn Venice, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Rome, and Turin.  At the last place he arrived without a passport, and in such a miserable condition that the guards at the gates of the city would not have admitted him had he not been recognised by a Venetian printer who happened to be present.  His startled looks, his nervous manner, and his perpetual restlessness, confirmed wherever he went the rumour of his madness; and, even if he were not mad, the object of Alfonso of Este’s anger might be a dangerous associate.  During all this time he was in the greatest poverty, being obliged to sell for bread the splendid ruby and collar of gold which the Duchess of Urbino had presented to him when he recited to her at her own court his pastoral poem of Aminta.

From the Duke of Urbino and Prince Charles Emanuel of Savoy, however, he received generous treatment; but a fatal spell carried him back a third time to Ferrara.  His arrival by an unfortunate coincidence happened to be on the very day that Margaret Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua, was to come home as the third bride of Alfonso.  The duke, preoccupied with the stately ceremonies connected with his nuptials, took no notice of him; and many of the courtiers from whom he expected an affectionate welcome, taking their cue from their master, turned their backs upon him.  What a contrast to his first reception at that court fourteen years before, when he stood among the noble spectators of Alfonso’s marriage with his first wife, the Archduchess of Austria, as one of the most honoured of the guests!  He now gazed upon the splendours of this third marriage ceremony, by far the greatest poet of his age, but a homeless vagrant, a reputed maniac, treated with neglect or contumely on every side!  No wonder that his cup of misery, which had previously been filled to the brim, overflowed with this last and crowning insult; and, scarce knowing what he did, he broke forth into the most vehement denunciations of the duke and his whole court, declaring that they were all “a gang of poltroons, ingrates, and scoundrels.”  These fiery reproaches, which his misery had wrung from the poor poet, were carried by his enemies to the ear of the Duke, and Tasso was immediately seized and imprisoned as a lunatic in the hospital of Santa Anna in Ferrara—­in the same year and the same month, it may be mentioned, in which another of the great epic poets of the world, Camoens, the author of the Lusiad, finished as a pauper in an hospital his miserable career.

While madness was alleged as the ostensible reason, the real motives of this step are involved in as deep a mystery as the cause of Ovid’s banishment to Tomi, on the Euxine.  Muratori, the author of the Antiquities of the House of Este, says that he was confined principally in order that he might be cured; while the Abbate Serassi, who wrote a life of the poet, attributes his imprisonment to