[Footnote 47:  Lettere, vol. ii. p. 67.]

No one who has read the foregoing pages will wonder why Tasso was imprisoned.  The marvel is rather that the fact should have roused so many speculations.  Alfonso was an autocratic princeling.  His favorite minister Montecatino fell in one moment from a height of power to irrecoverable ruin.  The famous preacher Panigarola, for whom he negotiated a Cardinal’s hat, lost his esteem by seeking promotion at another Court, and had to fly Ferrara.  His friend, Ercole Contrario, was strangled in the castle on suspicion of having concealed a murder.  Tasso had been warned repeatedly, repeatedly forgiven; and now when he turned up again with the same complaints and the same menaces, Alfonso determined to have done with the nuisance.  He would not kill him, but he would put him out of sight and hearing.  If he was guilty, S. Anna would be punishment enough.  If he was mad, it might be hoped that S. Anna would cure him.  To blame the duke for this exercise of authority, is difficult.  Noble as is the poet’s calling, and faithful as are the wounds of a devoted friend and servant, there are limits to princely patience.  It is easier to blame Tasso for the incurable idealism which, when he was in comfort at Turin, made him pine ’to kiss the hand of his Highness, and recover some part of his favor on the occasion of his marriage.’[48]

Three long letters, written by Tasso during the early months of his imprisonment, discuss the reasons for his arrest.[49] Two of these are directed to his staunch friend Scipione Gonzaga, the third to Giacomo Buoncompagno, nephew of Pope Gregory XIII.  Partly owing to omissions made by the editors before publication, and partly perhaps to the writer’s reticence, they throw no very certain light even on his own opinion.[50] But this much appears tolerably clear.  Tasso was half-mad and altogether irritable.  He had used language which could not be overlooked.  The Duke continued to resent his former practice with the Medici, and disapproved of his perpetual wanderings.  The courtiers had done their utmost to prejudice his mind by calumnies and gossip, raking up all that seemed injurious to Tasso’s reputation in the past acts of his life and in the looser verses found among his papers.  It may also be conceded that they contrived to cast an unfavorable light upon his affectionate correspondence with the two princesses.  Tasso himself laid great stress upon his want of absolute loyalty, upon some lascivious compositions, and lastly upon his supposed heresies.  It is not probable that the duke attached importance to such poetry as Tasso may have written in the heat of youth; and it is certain that he regarded the heresies as part of the poet’s hallucinations.  It is also far more likely that the Leonora episode passed in his mind for another proof of mental infirmity than that he judged it seriously.  It was quite enough that Tasso had put himself in the wrong by petulant abuse of his benefactor and by persistent fretfulness.  Moreover, he was plainly brain-sick.  That alone justified Alfonso in his own eyes.