much even for
the allowed ultra courtesies of Italian acknowledgment. His compliments
to most people are varied with astonishing grace and ingenuity; his
accounts of his condition often sufficient to bring the tears into
the manliest eyes; and his ceaseless and vain efforts to procure his
liberation mortifying when we think of himself, and exasperating when we
think of the petty despot who detained him in so long, so degrading, and
so worse than useless a confinement.

Tasso could not always conceal his contempt of his imprisoner from the
ducal servants. Alfonso excelled the grandiloquent poet himself in his
love of pomp and worship; and as he had no particular merits to warrant
it, his victim bantered his love of titles. He says, in a letter to the
duke's steward, "If it is the pleasure of the Most Serene Signor Duke,
Most Clement and Most Invincible, to keep me in prison, may I beg that he
will have the goodness to return certain little things of mine, which
his Most Invincible, Most Clement, and Most Serene Highness has so often
promised me.[14]

But these were rare ebullitions of gaiety, perhaps rather of bitter
despair. A playful address to a cat to lend him her eyes to write by,
during some hour in which he happened to be without a light (for it
does not appear to have been denied him), may be taken as more probable
evidence of a mind relieved at the moment, though the necessity for
the relief may have been very sad. But the style in which he generally
alludes to his situation is far different. He continually begs his
correspondents to pity him, to pray for him, to attribute his errors to
infirmity. He complains of impaired memory, and acknowledges that he has
become subject to the deliriums formerly attributed to him by the enemies
that had helped to produce them. Petitioning the native city of his
ancestors (Bergamo) to intercede for him with the duke, he speaks of the
writer as "this unhappy person;" and subscribes himself,--

"Most illustrious Signors, your affectionate servant, Torquato Tasso, a
prisoner, and infirm, in the hospital of St. Anne in Ferrara."

In one of his addresses to Alfonso, he says most affectingly:

"I have sometimes attributed much to myself, and considered myself as
somebody. But now, seeing in how many ways imagination has imposed on
me, I suspect that it has also deceived me in this opinion of my own
consequence. Indeed, methinks the past has been a dream; and hence I am
resolved