sensitively deferent to literary opinion.  Therefore, in an evil hour, yielding to Gonzaga’s advice, he resolved to submit the Gerusalemme in MS. to four censors—­Il Borga, Flaminio de’Nobili, vulpine Speroni with his poisoned fang of pedantry, precise Antoniano with his inquisitorial prudery.  They were to pass their several criticisms on the plot, characters, diction, and ethics of the Gerusalemme; Tasso was to entertain and weigh their arguments, reserving the right of following or rejecting their advice, but promising to defend his own views.  To the number of this committee he shortly after added three more scholars, Francesco Piccolomini, Domenico Veniero, and Celio Magno.[15] Not to have been half maddened by these critics would have proved Tasso more or less than human.  They picked holes in the structure of the epic, in its episodes, in its theology, in its incidents, in its language, in its title.  One censor required one alteration, and another demanded the contrary.  This man seemed animated by an acrid spite; that veiled his malice in the flatteries of candid friendship.  Antoniano was for cutting out the love passages:  Armida, Sofronia, Erminia, Clorinda, were to vanish or to be adapted to conventual proprieties.  It seemed to him more than doubtful whether the enchanted forest did not come within the prohibitions of the Tridentine decrees.  As the revision advanced, matters grew more serious.  Antoniano threw out some decided hints of ecclesiastical displeasure; Tasso, reading between the lines, scented the style of the Collegium Germanicum.

[Footnote 15:  Tasso consulted almost every scholar he could press into his service.  But the official tribunal of correction was limited to the above named four acting in concert with Scipione Gonzaga.]

Speroni spoke openly of plagiarism—­plagiarism from himself forsooth!—­and murmured the terrible words between his teeth, ’Tasso is mad!’ He was in fact driven wild, and told his tormentors that he would delay the publication of the epic, perhaps for a year, perhaps for his whole life, so little hope had he of its success.[16] At last he resolved to compose an allegory to explain and moralize the poem.  When he wrote the Gerusalemme he had no thought of hidden meanings; but this seemed the only way of preventing it from being dismembered by hypocrites and pedants.[17] The expedient proved partially successful.  When Antoniano and his friends were bidden to perceive a symbol in the enchanted wood and other marvels, a symbol in the loves of heroines and heroes, a symbol even in Armida, they relaxed their wrath.  The Gerusalemme might possibly pass muster now before the Congregation of the Index.  Tasso’s correspondence between March 1575 and July 1576 shows what he suffered at the hands of his revisers, and helps to explain the series of events which rendered the autumn of that latter year calamitous for him.[18] There are, indeed, already indications in the letters of those months that his nerves, enfeebled by the quartan fever under which he labored, and exasperated by carping or envious criticism, were overstrung.