trained by both these influences.  He could not, however, when he put this theory forward in elaborate prose, abstain from propositions, distinctions, deductions, and conclusions, all of which were discutable, and each of which his critics and his honor held him bound to follow.  In short, while planning and producing the Gerusalemme, he was involved in controversies on the very essence of his art.  These controversies had been started by himself and he could not do otherwise than maintain the position he had chosen.  His poet’s inspiration, his singer’s spontaneity, came thus constantly into collision with his own deliberate utterances.  A perplexed self-scrutiny was the inevitable result, which pedagogues who were not inspired and could not sing, but who delighted in minute discussion, took good care to stimulate.  The worst, however, was that he had erected in his own mind a critical standard with which his genius was not in harmony.  The scholar and the poet disagreed in Tasso; and it must be reckoned one of the drawbacks of his age and education that the former preceded the latter in development.  Something of the same discord can be traced in contemporary painting, as will be shown when I come to consider the founders of the Bolognese Academy.

At the end of 1565 Tasso was withdrawn from literary studies and society in Padua.  The Cardinal Luigi d’Este offered him a place in his household; and since this opened the way to Ferrara and Court-service, it was readily accepted.  It would have been well for Tasso, at this crisis of his fate, if the line of his beloved Aeneid—­

    Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum—­

that line which warned young Savonarola away from Ferrara, had sounded in his ears, or met his eyes in some Virgilian Sortes.  It would have been well if his father, disillusioned by the Amadigi’s ill-success, and groaning under the galling yoke of servitude to Princes, had forbidden instead of encouraging this fatal step.  He might himself have listened to the words of old Speroni, painting the Court as he had learned to know it, a Siren fair to behold and ravishing of song, but hiding in her secret caves the bones of men devoured, and ’mighty poets in their misery dead.’  He might even have turned the pages of Aretino’s Dialogo delle Corti, and have observed how the ruffian who best could profit by the vices of a Court, refused to bow his neck to servitude in their corruption.  But no man avoids his destiny, because few draw wisdom from the past and none foresee the future.  To Ferrara Tasso went with a blithe heart.  Inclination, the custom of his country, the necessities of that poet’s vocation for which he had abandoned a profession, poverty and ambition, vanity and the delights of life, combined to lure him to his ruin.