For a whole year Tasso endured all the horrors of the sordid cell in which he was immured.  After a while he was removed to a larger apartment, in which he could walk about; and permission was granted to him sometimes to leave the hospital for part of a day.  But whatever alleviations he might thus have occasionally enjoyed, he was for seven long years a prisoner in the asylum, tantalised by continual expectations held out to him of approaching release.  One person only—­the nephew of his churlish jailer—­acted the part of the Good Samaritan towards him, cheered his solitude, wrote for him, and transmitted the letters of complaint or entreaty which he addressed to his friends, and which would otherwise have been suppressed or forwarded to his relentless enemy.  His sufferings increased as the slow weary months passed on, so that we need not wonder that the last years of his captivity should sometimes have been overclouded by visions of a tormenting demon, of flames and frightful noises, with an apparition of the Virgin and Child sent to comfort him.  That he should have been able to preserve the general balance of his mind at all in circumstances sufficient to unseat the reason of most men, is a convincing proof of the stability of his intellect, and his unshaken trust in the God of the sorrowful.  While we think of this protracted cruelty of the author of his imprisonment, it is some consolation to know that he met with what we may well call a merited retribution.  Alfonso, as Sir John Hobhouse tells us, in spite of his haughty splendour, led an unhappy life, and was deserted in the hour of death by his courtiers, who suffered his body to be interred without even the ceremonies that were paid to the meanest of his subjects.  His last wishes were neglected; his will was cancelled.  He was succeeded by the descendant of a natural son of Alfonso I., the husband of Lucrezia Borgia; and he, falling under the displeasure of the Vatican, was excommunicated; and Ferrara, having been claimed by Pope Clement VIII. as a vacant fief, passed away for ever from the house of Este.

                              “The link
    Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think
    Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn,
    Alfonso!  How thy ducal pageants shrink
    From thee! if in another station born,
    Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou mad’st to mourn.”

At no period of his life was the mind of Tasso more active than during his imprisonment.  In the absence of all nourishment from the bright world of Nature which he loved so passionately, his fancy could grow and keep itself leafy, like the cress-seed, which germinates and produces its anti-scorbutic foliage on a bit of flannel moistened with water, without any contact with soil or sunlight, in the long Arctic night of the ice-bound ship.  With the ravings of madmen ringing in his ears, he composed some of the most beautiful of his writings, both in prose and verse.