conducted
by a courtier with ill-disguised insolence. The princesses refused him
access to their lodgings, and his old enemies openly manifested their
derision for the kill-joy and the skeleton who had returned to spoil
their festival. Tasso, querulous as he was about his own share in the
disagreeables of existence, remained wholly unsympathetic to the trials
of his fellow-creatures. Self-engrossment closed him in a magic
prison-house of discontent.

[Footnote 44: _Op. cit._ p. 143.]

[Footnote 45: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 268.]

Therefore when he saw Ferrara full of merry-making guests, and heard
the marriage music ringing through the courtyards of the castle, he
failed to reflect with what a heavy heart the duke might now be entering
upon his third sterile nuptials. Alfonso was childless, brotherless,
with no legitimate heir to defend his duchy from the Church in case of
his decease. The irritable poet forgot how distasteful at such a moment
of forced gayety and hollow parade his reappearance, with the old
complaining murmurs, the old suspicions, the old restless eyes, might be
to the master who had certainly borne much and long with him. He only
felt himself neglected, insulted, outraged:

Questa e la data fede?
Son questi i miei bramati alti ritorni?[46]

Then he burst out into angry words, which he afterwards acknowledged to
have been 'false, mad and rash.'[47] The duke's patience had reached its
utmost limit. Tasso was arrested, and confined in the hospital for mad
folk at S. Anna. This happened in March 1579. He was detained there
until July 19, 1586, a period of seven years and four months.

[Footnote 46: From the sonnet, _Sposa regal_ (_Opere_ vol. iii. p.
218).]

[Footnote 47: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 67.]

No one who has read the foregoing pages will wonder why Tasso was
imprisoned. The marvel is rather that the fact should have roused so
many speculations. Alfonso was an autocratic princeling. His favorite
minister Montecatino fell in one moment from a height of power to
irrecoverable ruin. The famous preacher Panigarola, for whom he
negotiated a Cardinal's hat, lost his esteem by seeking promotion at
another Court, and had to fly Ferrara. His friend, Ercole Contrario, was
strangled in the castle on suspicion of having concealed a murder. Tasso
had been warned repeatedly, repeatedly forgiven; and now when he turned
up again with the same complaints and the same menaces, Alfonso
dete