In 1574 Guarini was sent to Poland, to congratulate Henri III. upon his election to that monarchy.  He went a second time in the following year to conduct more delicate negotiations.  The crown of Poland was now thrown open to candidature; and more than one of the Italian Princes thought seriously of competing for this honor.  The Grand Duke of Tuscany entertained the notion and abandoned it.  But Alfonso II. of Ferrara, who had fought with honor in his youth in Hungary, made it a serious object of ambition.  Manolesso, the Venetian envoy in 1575 at Ferrara, relates how the duke spent laborious hours in acquiring the German language, ’which no one learns for pleasure, since it is most barbarous, nor quickly, but with industry and large expenditure of time.’  He also writes:  ’The duke aspires to greatness, nor is satisfied with his present State; and therefore he has entered into the Polish affair, encouraged thereto by his brother the Cardinal and by his ambassador in Poland.’[178]

These embassies were a serious drain upon Guarini’s resources; for it appears certain that if he received any appointments, they were inadequate to the expenses of long journeys and the maintenance of a becoming state.  He therefore returned to Ferrara, considerably burdened with debts; and this was just the time at which Tasso’s mental derangement began to manifest itself.  Between 1575 and 1579, the date of Tasso’s imprisonment at Sant’ Anna, the two men lived together at the Court.  Guarini’s rivalry induced him at this period to cultivate poetry with such success that, when the author of the Gerusalemme failed, Alfonso commanded him to take the vacant place of Court poet.  There is an interesting letter extant from Guarini to his friend Cornelio Bentivoglio, describing the efforts he made to comply with the Duke’s pleasure.  ’I strove to transform myself into another man, and, like a playactor, to reassume the character, manners and emotions of a past period.  Mature in age, I forced myself to appear young; exchanged my melancholy for gayety:  affected loves I did not feel; turned my wisdom into folly, and, in a word, passed from philosopher to poet.’[179] How ill-adapted he was to this masquerade existence may be gathered from another sentence in the same letter.  ’I am already in my forty-fourth year, burdened with debts, the father of eight children, two of my sons old enough to be my judges, and with my daughters to marry.’

[Footnote 178:  Alberi, Relazioni, series 2, vol. ii. pp. 423-425.]

At last, abandoning this uncongenial strain upon his faculties, Guarini retired in 1582 to the villa which he had built upon his ancestral estate in the Polesine, that delightful rustic region between Adige and Po.  Here he gave himself up to the cares of his family, the nursing of his dilapidated fortune, and the composition of the Pastor Fido.  It is not yet the time to speak of that work, upon which Guarini’s fame as poet rests; for the drama, though suggested