The seven years and four months of Tasso’s imprisonment may be passed over briefly.  With regard to his so-called dungeon, it is certain that, after some months spent in a narrow chamber, he obtained an apartment of several rooms.  He was allowed to write and receive as many letters as he chose.  Friends paid him visits, and he went abroad under surveillance in the city of Ferrara.  To extenuate the suffering which a man of his temper endured in this enforced seclusion would be unjust to Tasso.  There is no doubt that he was most unhappy.  But to exaggerate his discomforts would be unjust to the duke.  Even Manso describes ’the excellent and most convenient lodgings’ assigned him in S. Anna, alludes to the provision for his cure by medicine, and remarks upon the opposition which he offered to medical treatment.  According to this biographer, his own endeavors to escape necessitated a strict watch upon his movements.[53] Unless, therefore, we flatly deny the fact of his derangement, which is supported by a mass of testimony, it may be doubted whether Tasso was more miserable in S. Anna than he would have been at large.  The subsequent events of his life prove that his release brought no mitigation of his malady.

[Footnote 53:  Op. cit. p. 155.]

It was, however, a dreary time.  He spent his days in writing letters to all the princes of Italy, to Naples, to Bergamo, to the Roman Curia, declaiming on his wretchedness and begging for emancipation.  Occasional poems flowed from his pen.  But during this period he devoted his serious hours mainly to prose composition.  The bulk of his Dialogues issued from S. Anna.  On August 7, 1580, Celio Malaspina published a portion of the Gerusalemme at Venice, under the title of Il Gottifredo di M. Torquato Tasso.  In February of the following year, his friend Angelo Ingegneri gave the whole epic to the world.  Within six months from that date the poem was seven times reissued.  This happened without the sanction or the supervision of the luckless author; and from the sale of the book he obtained no profit.  Leonora d’Este died upon February 10, 1581.  A volume of elegies appeared on this occasion; but Tasso’s Muse uttered no sound.[54] He wrote to Panigarola that ’a certain tacit repugnance of his genius’ forced him to be mute.[55] His rival Guarini undertook a revised edition of his lyrics in 1582.  Tasso had to bear this dubious compliment in silence.  All Europe was devouring his poems; scribes and versifiers were building up their reputation on his fame.  Yet he could do nothing.  Embittered by the piracies of publishers, infuriated by the impertinence of editors, he lay like one forgotten in that hospital.  His celebrity grew daily; but he languished, penniless and wretched, in confinement which he loathed.  The strangest light is cast upon his state of mind by the efforts which he now made to place two of his sister’s children in Court-service.  He even tried to introduce one of them as a page into the