ate his food apart; and after a short residence, the Princesses, sisters of the Duke, invited him to share their meals.  The next five years formed the happiest and most tranquil period of his existence.  He continued working at the poem which had then no name, but which we know as the Gerusalemme Liberata.  Envies and jealousies had not arisen to mar the serenity in which he basked.  Women contended for his smiles and sonnets.  He repaid their kindness with somewhat indiscriminate homage and with the verses of occasion which flowed so easily from his pen.  It is difficult to trace the history of Tasso’s loves through the labyrinth of madrigals, odes and sonnets which belong to this epoch of his life.  These compositions bear, indeed, the mark of a distinguished genius; no one but Tasso could have written them at that period of Italian literature.  Yet they lack individuality of emotion, specific passion, insight into the profundities of human feeling.  Such shades of difference as we perceive in them, indicate the rhetorician seeking to set forth his motive, rather than the lover pouring out his soul.  Contrary to the commonly received legend, I am bound to record my opinion that love played a secondary part in Tasso’s destinies.  It is true that we can discern the silhouettes of some Court-ladies whom he fancied more than others.  The first of these was Laura Peperara, for whom he is supposed to have produced some sixty compositions.  The second was the Princess Leonora d’Este.  Tasso’s attachment to her has been so shrouded in mystery, conjecture and hair-splitting criticism, that none but a very rash man will pronounce confident judgment as to its real nature.  Nearly the same may be said about his relations to her sister, Lucrezia.  He has posed in literary history as the Rizzio of the one lady and the Chastelard of the other.  Yet he was probably in no position at any moment of his Ferrarese existence to be more than the familiar friend and most devoted slave of either.  When he joined the Court, Lucrezia was ten and Leonora nine years his senior.  Each of the sisters was highly accomplished, graceful and of royal carriage.  Neither could boast of eminent beauty.  Of the two, Lucrezia possessed the more commanding character.  It was she who left her husband, Francesco Maria della Rovere, because his society wearied her, and who helped Clement VIII. to ruin her family, when the Papacy resolved upon the conquest of Ferrara.  Leonora’s health was sickly.  For this reason she refused marriage, living retired in studies, acts of charity, religion, and the company of intellectual men.  Something in her won respect and touched the heart at the same moment; so that the verses in her honor, from whatever pen they flowed, ring with more than merely ceremonial compliment.  The people revered her like a saint; and in times of difficulty she displayed high courage and the gifts of one born to govern.  From the first entrance of Tasso into Ferrara, the