all the flatteries, direct and indirect, which he had originally bestowed upon the house of Este.  There is hardly a single stanza that is not changed.  But in the process of revision he deprived his poem of all life.  Religious mysticism has been substituted for the refined chivalry of the Crusades, and poetry and romance have been sacrificed for classical regularity and religious orthodoxy.  To any one familiar with the original, the Conquistata must be regarded as the most melancholy book in any language; a sad monument of a noble genius robbed of its power and depressed by calamity.  And it is all the more melancholy that the author himself was utterly unconscious of its defects, and got so enamoured of what he considered his improvements, that he wrote and published a discourse called the Giudizio—­a cold pedantic work, in which he explained the principles upon which he made his alterations.  In vain, however, did the author thus commit literary suicide.  His immortal poem had passed beyond the reach of revision, and stamped itself too deeply upon the minds and hearts of his countrymen to be effaced by any after version.  And now the Conquistata has sunk into well-merited oblivion, while the Liberata—­“his youthful poetical sin,” as he himself called it—­is everywhere admired as one of the great classics of the world.

For nine years Tasso lived after his imprisonment.  But his free life was only a little less burdensome than his prison one.  With impaired health and extinguished hope, and only the wreck of his great intellect, he wandered a homeless pilgrim from court to court, drawn like a moth to the brilliant flame that had wrought his ruin.  Well would it have been for him had he settled down to some quiet independent pursuit that would have taken him away from the atmosphere of court life altogether, such as the Professorship of Poetry and Ethics which had been offered to him by the Genoese Academy.  But the habits of a whole lifetime could not now be given up.  His education and training had fitted him for no other mode of life.  Without the patronage of the great, literature in those days had not a chance of success; and a thousand incidents in the life of Tasso serve to show that “genius was considered the property, not of the individual, but of his patron”; and with petty meanness was the reward allotted for this appropriation dealt out.  His experience of the favour of princes at this period was only a repetition of his own earlier one, and that of his father.  His patrons, one after another, got tired of him; and yet he persisted in soliciting their favour.  From the door of his former friend, Cardinal Gonzaga, at Rome, he was turned away; and as a fever-stricken mendicant he sought refuge in the Bergamese Hospital of that city, founded by a relative of his own, who little thought that it would one day afford an asylum to the most illustrious of his name.