sisters took him under their protection.  He lived with them on terms of more than courtly intimacy; and for Leonora there is no doubt that he cherished something like a romantic attachment.  This is proved by the episode of Sofronia and Olindo in the Gerusalemme, which points in carefully constructed innuendoes to his affection.  It can even be conceded that Tasso, who was wont to indulge fantastic visions of unattainable greatness, may have raised his hopes so high as sometimes to entertain the possibility of winning her hand.  But if he did dally with such dreams, the realities of his position must in sober moments have convinced him of their folly.  Had not a Duchess of Amalfi been murdered for contracting a marriage with a gentleman of her household?  And Leonora was a grand-daughter of France; and the cordon of royalty was being drawn tighter and tighter yearly in the Italy of his day.  That a sympathy of no commonplace kind subsisted between this delicate and polished princess and her sensitively gifted poet, is apparent.  But it may be doubted whether Tasso had in him the stuff of a grand passion.  Mobile and impressible, he wandered from object to object without seeking or attaining permanence.  He was neither a Dante nor a Petrarch; and nothing in his Rime reveals solidity of emotion.  It may finally be said that had Leonora returned real love, or had Tasso felt for her real love, his earnest wish to quit Ferrara when the Court grew irksome, would be inexplicable.  Had their liaison been scandalous, as some have fancied, his life would not have been worth two hours’ Purchase either in the palace or the prison of Alfonso.

Whatever may be thought of Tasso’s love-relations to these sisters—­and the problem is open to all conjectures in the absence of clear testimony—­it is certain that he owed a great deal to their kindness.  The marked favor they extended to him, was worth much at Court:  and their maturer age and wider experience enabled them to give him many useful hints of conduct.  Thus, when he blundered into seeming rivalry with Pigna (the Duke’s secretary, the Cecil of that little state), by praising Pigna’s mistress, Lucrezia Bendidio, in terms of imprudent warmth, it was Leonora who warned him to appease the great man’s anger.  This he did by writing a commentary upon three of Pigna’s leaden Canzoni, which he had the impudence to rank beside the famous three sisters of Petrarch’s Canzoniere.  The flattery was swallowed, and the peril was averted.  Yet in this first affair with Pigna we already hear the grumbling of that tempest which eventually ruined Tasso.  So eminent a poet and so handsome a young man was insupportable among a crowd of literary mediocrities and middle-aged gallants.  Furthermore the brilliant being, who aroused the jealousies of rhymesters and of lovers, had one fatal failing—­want of tact.  In 1568, for example, he set himself up as a target to all malice by sustaining fifty conclusions in the Science of Love before the Academy of Ferrara.  As he afterwards confessed, he ran the greatest risks in this adventure; but who, he said, could take up arms against a lover?  Doubtless there were many lovers present; but none of Tasso’s eloquence and skill in argument.