The story of this hapless love is so romantic in itself, and has been made the theme of so much pathetic poetry, that it would be almost a pity to destroy by proof any foundation upon which it may rest.  And yet it is difficult to agree with Professor Rosini, who has ably treated the whole question in a work entitled Amore de Tasso, and has come to the conclusion, after carefully weighing all the evidence, that this was the rock upon which Tasso’s life made shipwreck.  On this theory several circumstances are altogether inexplicable.  We may dismiss at once the famous kiss as certainly a myth.  Besides the disparity of age, the ill-health, severe piety, and exalted rank of Leonora were formidable barriers in the way of Tasso’s contracting a passion for her; and it is well known that the poet, who could not have forgotten so soon a devoted love, did not offer a single tribute of regret to her memory when she died a few years afterwards.  It is also but too certain that Leonora left her supposed lover to languish in a dungeon without any reply to his pathetic complaints.  The force of gravitation is a mutual thing; and just as the great sun himself cannot but bend a little in turn to the smallest orb that wheels around him, so the august Princess of Este could not but have regarded with womanly interest a devoted admirer, however humble.  The poetical gallantry of the day will account for all Tasso’s lyrical effusions in praise of Leonora.  They were in most instances simply the tributes that were expected from the laureate of a court, especially a laureate who was accused, with some show of reason, by the courtiers of Ferrara, of an enthusiastic devotion to women, and of wasting his life with the day-dreams of love and chivalry.

Regarding the question of his madness, which was, as I have said, the ostensible cause of his imprisonment, we are left in almost equal uncertainty.  His morbid sensibility, irritated by the treatment which he received alike from his friends and foes, his repeated complaints and occasional violences and extravagances of conduct, may have seemed to a selfish prince to border closely upon mental derangement.  But his whole conduct during his imprisonment, the nature of the numerous writings which he produced during that dark period, forbid us to suppose that his intellect ever crossed the line which separates reason from insanity.  From out the gloom that surrounds the whole case two points stand out clear and indisputable, that no indiscretion of conduct or aberration of mind on the part of Tasso can possibly have merited the sufferings to which he was subjected, and that whatever may have been Alfonso’s suspicions, his fiendish vengeance is one of history’s darkest crimes, and covers the tyrant with everlasting disgrace.