ory boast. If it was,
its very effrontery and vanity were presumptions of its falsehood. The
lady whom Tasso alludes to in the passage quoted on his first confinement
is complained of for her coldness towards him; and, unless this was
itself a gentlemanly blind, it might apply to fifty other ladies besides
the princess. The man who assaulted him in the streets, and who is
supposed to have been the violator of his papers, need not have found any
secrets of love in them. The servant at whom he aimed the knife or the
dagger might be as little connected with such matters; and the sonnets
which the poet said he wrote for a friend, and which he desired to be
buried with him, might be alike innocent of all reference to Leonora,
whether he wrote them for a friend or not. Leonora's death took
place during the poet's confinement; and, lamented as she was by the
verse-writers according to custom, Tasso wrote nothing on the event. This
silence has been attributed to the depth of his passion; but how is the
fact proved? and why may it not have been occasioned by there having been
no passion at all?

All that appears certain is, that Tasso spoke violent and contemptuous
words against the duke; that he often spoke ill of him in his letters;
that he endeavoured, not with perfect ingenuousness, to exchange his
service for that of another prince; that he asserted his madness to have
been pretended in the first instance purely to gratify the duke's whim
for thinking it so (which was one of the reasons perhaps why Alfonso,
as he complained, would not believe a word be said); and finally, that,
whether the madness was or was not so pretended, it unfortunately became
a confirmed though milder form of mania, during a long confinement.
Alfonso, too proud to forgive the poet's contempt, continued thus to
detain him, partly perhaps because he was not sorry to have a pretext for
revenge, partly because he did not know what to do with him, consistently
either with his own or the poet's safety. He had not been generous enough
to put Tasso above his wants; he had not address enough to secure his
respect; he had not merit enough to overlook his reproaches. If Tasso had
been as great a man as he was a poet, Alfonso would not have been reduced
to these perplexities. The poet would have known how to settle quietly
down on his small court-income, and wait patiently in the midst of his
beautiful visions for what fortune had or had not in store for him. But