October 4, 1575 (_Lettere di
Torquato Tasso_, 1852, i. 55-117). A mutilated first edition was
published in 1580 by "Orazio _alias_ Celio de' Malespini, avventuriere
intrigante" (Solerti's _Vita, etc._, 1895, i. 329).]

[179] [So, too, Gibbon was overtaken by a "sober melancholy" when he had
finished the last line of the last page of the _Decline and Fall_ on the
night of June 27, 1787.]

[180] {145}[Not long after his imprisonment, Tasso appealed to the mercy
of Alfonso, in a canzone of great beauty, ... and ... in another ode to
the princesses, whose pity he invoked in the name of their own mother,
who had herself known, if not the like horrors, the like solitude of
imprisonment, and bitterness of soul, made a similar appeal. (See _Life
of Tasso_, by John Black, 1810, ii. 64, 408.) Black prints the canzone
in full; Solerti (_Vita, etc._, i. 316-318) gives selections.]

[181] {146}["For nearly the first year of his confinement Tasso endured
all the horrors of a solitary sordid cell, and was under the care of a
gaoler whose chief virtue, although he was a poet and a man of letters,
was a cruel obedience to the commands of his prince.... His name was
Agostino Mosti.... Tasso says of him, in a letter to his sister, 'ed usa
meco ogni sorte di rigore ed inumanita.'"--Hobhouse, _Historical
Illustrations, etc_., 1818, pp. 20, 21, note 1.

Tasso, in a letter to Angelo Grillo, dated June 16, 1584 (Letter 288,
_Le Lettere, etc_., ii. 276), complains that Mosti did not interfere to
prevent him being molested by the other inmates, disturbed in his
studies, and treated disrespectfully by the governor's subordinates. In
the letter to his sister Cornelia, from which Hobhouse quotes, the
allusion is not to Mosti, but, according to Solerti, to the Cardinal
Luigi d'Este. Elsewhere (Letter 133, _Lettere_, ii. 88, 89) Tasso
describes Agostino Mosti as a rigorous and zealous Churchman, but far
too cultivated and courteous a gentleman to have exercised any severity
towards him _proprio motu_, or otherwise than in obedience to orders.]

[182] {147}[It is highly improbable that Tasso openly indulged, or
secretly nourished, a consuming passion for Leonora d'Este, and it is
certain that the "Sister of his Sovereign" had nothing to do with his
being shut up in the Hospital of Sant' Anna. That poet and princess had
known each other for over thirteen years, that the princess was seven
years older than the poet, and, in March, 1579, close upon f