Flattered and caressed through the months of October and November he began once more in December to hanker after his old home.  Inconceivable as it may seem, he opened fresh negotiations with the duke; and Alfonso, on his side, already showed a will to take him back.  Writing to his sister from Pesaro at the end of September, Tasso stay that a gentleman had been sent from Ferrara expressly to recall him.[45] The fact seems to be that Tasso was too illustrious to be neglected by the House of Este.  Away from their protection, he was capable of bringing on their name the slur of bad treatment and ingratitude.  Nor would it have looked well to publish the Gerusalemme with its praises of Alfonso, while the poet was lamenting his hard fate in every town of Italy.  The upshot of these negotiations was that Tasso resolved on retracing his steps.  He reached Ferrara again upon February 21, 1579, two days before Margherita Gonzaga, the duke’s new bride, made her pompous entrance into the city.  But his reception was far from being what he had expected.  The duke’s heart seemed hardened.  Apartments inferior to his quality were assigned him, and to these he was conducted by a courtier with ill-disguised insolence.  The princesses refused him access to their lodgings, and his old enemies openly manifested their derision for the kill-joy and the skeleton who had returned to spoil their festival.  Tasso, querulous as he was about his own share in the disagreeables of existence, remained wholly unsympathetic to the trials of his fellow-creatures.  Self-engrossment closed him in a magic prison-house of discontent.

[Footnote 44:  Op. cit. p. 143.]

[Footnote 45:  Lettere, vol. i. p. 268.]

Therefore when he saw Ferrara full of merry-making guests, and heard the marriage music ringing through the courtyards of the castle, he failed to reflect with what a heavy heart the duke might now be entering upon his third sterile nuptials.  Alfonso was childless, brotherless, with no legitimate heir to defend his duchy from the Church in case of his decease.  The irritable poet forgot how distasteful at such a moment of forced gayety and hollow parade his reappearance, with the old complaining murmurs, the old suspicions, the old restless eyes, might be to the master who had certainly borne much and long with him.  He only felt himself neglected, insulted, outraged: 

                Questa e la data fede? 
    Son questi i miei bramati alti ritorni?[46]

Then he burst out into angry words, which he afterwards acknowledged to have been ’false, mad and rash.’[47] The duke’s patience had reached its utmost limit.  Tasso was arrested, and confined in the hospital for mad folk at S. Anna.  This happened in March 1579.  He was detained there until July 19, 1586, a period of seven years and four months.

[Footnote 46:  From the sonnet, Sposa regal (Opere vol. iii. p. 218).]