rs of the Renaissance. Their successor, Alphonso I.
(1486-1534), who married Lucrezia Borgia, 1502, honoured himself by
attaching Ariosto to his court, and it was his grandson, Alphonso II.
(d. 1597), who first befriended and afterwards, on the score of lunacy,
imprisoned Tasso in the Hospital of Sant' Anna (1579-86).]

[417] {355} [It is a fact that Tasso was an involuntary inmate of the
Hospital of Sant' Anna at Ferrara for seven years and four months--from
March, 1579, to July, 1586--but the causes, the character, and the place
of his imprisonment have been subjects of legend and misrepresentation.
It has long been known and acknowledged (see Hobhouse's _Historical
Illustrations_, 1818, pp. 5-31) that a real or feigned passion for Duke
Alphonso's sister, Leonora d'Este, was not the cause or occasion of his
detention, and that the famous cell or dungeon ("nine paces by six, and
about seven high") was not "the original place of the poet's
confinement." It was, as Shelley says (see his letter to Peacock,
November 7, 1818), "a very decent dungeon;" but it was not Tasso's. The
setting of the story was admitted to be legendary, but the story itself,
that a poet was shut up in a madhouse because a vindictive magnate
resented his love of independence and impatience of courtly servitude,
was questioned, only to be reasserted as historical. The publication of
Tasso's letters by Guasti, in 1853, a review of Tasso's character and
career in Symonds's _Renaissance in Italy_, and, more recently, Signor
Angelo Solerti's monumental work, _Vita di Torquato Tasso_ (1895), which
draws largely upon the letters of contemporaries, the accounts of the
ducal court, and other documentary evidence, have in a great measure
exonerated the duke at the expense of the unhappy poet himself. Briefly,
Tasso's intrigues with rival powers--the Medici at Florence, the papal
court, and the Holy Office at Bologna--aroused the alarm and suspicion
of the duke, whilst his general demeanour and his outbursts of violence
and temper compelled, rather than afforded, a pretext for his
confinement. Before his final and fatal return to Ferrara, he had been
duly warned that he must submit to be treated as a person of disordered
intellect, and that if he continued to throw out hints of designs upon
his life and of persecution in high places, he would be banished from
the ducal court and dominions. But return he would, and at an
inauspicious moment, when the duke was pr