the year which followed his return to Ferrara in 1576.  But they reached their climax in the spring of 1577.  He had lost his prestige, and every servant might insult him, and every cur snap at his heels.  Even the Gerusalemme, became an object of derision.  It transpired that the revisers, to whom he had confided it, were picking the poem to pieces; ignoramuses who could not scan a line, went about parroting their pedantries and strictures.  At the beginning of 1576 Tasso had begged Alfonso to give him the post of historiographer left vacant by Pigna.  It was his secret hope that this would be refused, and that so he would obtain a good excuse for leaving Ferrara.[27] But the duke granted his request.  In the autumn of that year, one of the band of his tormentors, Maddalo de’Frecci, betrayed some details of his love-affairs.  What these were we do not know.  Tasso resented the insult, and gave the traitor a box on the ears in the courtyard of the castle.  Maddalo and his brothers, after this, attacked Tasso on the piazza, but ran away before they reached him with their swords.  They were outlawed for the outrage, and the duke of Ferrara, still benignant to his poet, sent him a kind message by one of his servants.  This incident weighed on Tasso’s memory.  The terror of the Inquisition blended now with two new terrors.  He conceived that his exiled foes were plotting to poison him.  He wondered whether Maddalo’s revelations had reached the duke’s ears, and if so, whether Alfonso would not inflict sudden vengeance.  There is no sufficient reason, however, to surmise that Tasso’s conscience was really burdened with a guilty secret touching Leonora d’Este.  On the contrary, everything points to a different conclusion.  His mind was simply giving way.  Just as he conjured up the ghastly specter of the Inquisition, so he fancied that the duke would murder him.  Both the Inquisition and the duke were formidable; but the Holy Office mildly told him to set his morbid doubts at rest, and the duke on a subsequent occasion coldly wrote:  ’I know he thinks I want to kill him.  But if indeed I did so, it would be easy enough.’  The duke, in fact, had no sufficient reason and no inclination to tread upon this insect.

[Footnote 27:  Lettere, vol. i. p. 139.]

In June 1577, the crisis came.  On the seventeenth evening of the month Tasso was in the apartments of the Duchess of Urbino.  He had just been declaiming on the subject of his imaginary difficulties with the Inquisition, when something in the manner of a servant who passed by aroused his suspicion.  He drew a knife upon the man—­like Hamlet in his mother’s bedchamber.  He was immediately put under arrest, and confined in a room of the castle.  Next day Maffeo Veniero wrote thus to the Grand Duke of Tuscany about the incident.  ’Yesterday Tasso was imprisoned for having drawn a knife upon a servant in the apartment of the Duchess of Urbino.  The intention has been to stay disorder and to cure him, rather than to inflict punishment.  He suffers under peculiar delusions, believing himself guilty of heresy and dreading poison; which state of mind arises, I incline to think, from melancholic blood forced in upon the heart and vaporing to the brain.  A wretched case, in truth, considering his great parts and his goodness!’[28]