[Footnote 16:  Lettere, vol. i. p. 114.]

[Footnote 17:  Ib. vol. i. p. 192.]

[Footnote 18:  Vol. i. pp. 55-215.]

Suspicions began to invade his mind.  He complained of headache.  His spirits alternated between depression and hysterical gayety.  A dread lest the Inquisition should refuse the imprimatur to his poem haunted him.  He grew restless, and yearned for change of scene.

The events of 1575, 1576, and 1577 require to be minutely studied:  for upon our interpretation of them must depend the theory which we hold of Tasso’s subsequent misfortunes.  It appears that early in the year 1575 he was becoming discontented with Ferrara.  A party in the Court, led by Pigna, did their best to make his life there disagreeable.  They were jealous of the poet’s fame, which shone with trebled splendor after the production of Aminta.  Tasso’s own behavior provoked, if it did not exactly justify their animosity.  He treated men at least his equals in position with haughtiness, which his irritable temper rendered insupportable.  We have it from his own pen that ’he could not bear to live in a city where the nobles did not yield him the first place, or at least admit him to absolute equality’; that ’he expected to be adored by friends, served by serving-men, caressed by domestics, honored by masters, celebrated by poets, and pointed out by all.’[19]

[Footnote 19:  Lettere, vol. iii. p. 41, iv. p. 332.]

He admitted that it was his habit ’to build castles in the air of honors, favors, gifts and graces, showered on him by emperors and kings and mighty princes’; that ’the slightest coldness from a patron seemed to him a tacit act of dismissal, or rather an open act of violence.’[20] His blood, he argued, placed him on a level with the aristocracy of Italy; but his poetry lifted him far above the vulgar herd of noblemen.  At the same time, while claiming so much, he constantly declared himself unfit for any work or office but literary study, and expressed his opinion that princes ought to be his tributaries.[21] Though such pretensions may not have been openly expressed at this period of his life, it cannot be doubted that Tasso’s temper made him an unpleasant comrade in Court-service.  His sensitiveness, as well as the actual slenderness of his fortunes, exposed him only too obviously to the malevolent tricks and petty bullyings of rivals.  One knows what a boy of that stamp has to suffer at public schools, and a Court is after all not very different from an academy.

Such being the temper of his mind, Tasso at this epoch turned his thoughts to bettering himself, as servants say.  His friend Scipione Gonzaga pointed out that both the Cardinal de’Medici and the Grand Duke of Tuscany would be glad to welcome him as an ornament of their households.  Tasso nibbled at the bait all through the summer; and in November, under the pretext of profiting by the Jubilee, he traveled to Rome.  This journey, as he afterwards declared, was the beginning of his ruin.[22] It was certainly one of the principal steps which led to the prison of S. Anna.