76 Tasso had begged Alfonso to give him the post of historiographer
left vacant by Pigna. It was his secret hope that this would be refused,
and that so he would obtain a good excuse for leaving Ferrara.[27] But
the duke granted his request. In the autumn of that year, one of the
band of his tormentors, Maddalo de'Frecci, betrayed some details of his
love-affairs. What these were we do not know. Tasso resented the insult,
and gave the traitor a box on the ears in the courtyard of the castle.
Maddalo and his brothers, after this, attacked Tasso on the piazza, but
ran away before they reached him with their swords. They were outlawed
for the outrage, and the duke of Ferrara, still benignant to his poet,
sent him a kind message by one of his servants. This incident weighed on
Tasso's memory. The terror of the Inquisition blended now with two new
terrors. He conceived that his exiled foes were plotting to poison him.
He wondered whether Maddalo's revelations had reached the duke's ears,
and if so, whether Alfonso would not inflict sudden vengeance. There is
no sufficient reason, however, to surmise that Tasso's conscience was
really burdened with a guilty secret touching Leonora d'Este. On the
contrary, everything points to a different conclusion. His mind was
simply giving way. Just as he conjured up the ghastly specter of the
Inquisition, so he fancied that the duke would murder him. Both the
Inquisition and the duke were formidable; but the Holy Office mildly
told him to set his morbid doubts at rest, and the duke on a subsequent
occasion coldly wrote: 'I know he thinks I want to kill him. But if
indeed I did so, it would be easy enough.' The duke, in fact, had no
sufficient reason and no inclination to tread upon this insect.

[Footnote 27: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 139.]

In June 1577, the crisis came. On the seventeenth evening of the month
Tasso was in the apartments of the Duchess of Urbino. He had just been
declaiming on the subject of his imaginary difficulties with the
Inquisition, when something in the manner of a servant who passed by
aroused his suspicion. He drew a knife upon the man--like Hamlet in his
mother's bedchamber. He was immediately put under arrest, and confined
in a room of the castle. Next day Maffeo Veniero wrote thus to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany about the incident. 'Yesterday Tasso was imprisoned for
having drawn a knife upon a servant in the apartment of the Duchess of
Urbino. The intention has be