He found Ferrara far more magnificent than Urbino.  Pageants, hunting parties, theatrical entertainments, assumed fantastic forms of splendor in this capital, which no other city of Italy, except Florence and Venice upon rare occasions, rivaled.  For a long while past Ferrara had been the center of a semi-feudal, semi-humanistic culture, out of which the Masque and Drama, music and painting, scholarship and poetry, emerged with brilliant originality, blending mediaeval and antique elements in a specific type of modern romance.  This culminated in the permanent and monumental work began by Boiardo in the morning, and completed by Ariosto in the meridian of the Renaissance.  Within the circuit of the Court the whole life of the Duchy seemed to concentrate itself.  From the frontier of Venice to the Apennines a tract of fertile country, yielding all necessaries of life, corn, wine, cattle, game, fish, in abundance, poured its produce into the palaces and castles of the Duke.  He, like other Princes of his epoch, sucked each province dry in order to maintain a dazzling show of artificial wealth.  The people were ground down by taxes, monopolies of corn and salt, and sanguinary game-laws.  Brutalized by being forced to serve the pleasures of their masters, they lived the lives of swine.  But why repaint the picture of Italian decadence, or dwell again upon the fever of that phthisical consumption?  Men like Tasso saw nothing to attract attention in the rotten state of Ferrara.  They were only fascinated by the hectic bloom and rouged refinement of its Court.  And even the least sympathetic student must confess that the Court at any rate was seductive.  A more cunningly combined medley of polite culture, political astuteness, urbane learning, sumptuous display, diplomatic love-intrigue and genial artistic productiveness, never before or since has been exhibited upon a scale so grandiose within limits so precisely circumscribed, or been raised to eminence so high from such inadequate foundations of substantial wealth.  Compare Ferrara in the sixteenth with Weimar in the eighteenth century, and reflect how wonderfully the Italians even at their last gasp understood the art of exquisite existence!

Alfonso II., who was always vainly trying to bless Ferrara with an heir, had arranged his second sterile nuptials when Tasso joined the Court in 1565.  It was therefore at a moment of more than usual parade of splendor that the poet entered on the scene of his renown and his misfortune.  He was twenty-one years of age; and twenty-one years had to elapse before he should quit Ferrara, ruined in physical and mental health,—­quantum mutatus ab illo Torquato!  The diffident and handsome stripling, famous as the author of Rinaldo, was welcomed in person with special honors by the Cardinal, his patron.  Of such favors as Court-lacqueys prize, Tasso from the first had plenty.  He did not sit at the common table of the serving gentlemen, but