erefore, we may suppose, without other
reasons than his being merely a Guelph, that Dante in his _Inferno_
placed one of the scions of the house in hell, and uniformly regarded
the family with dislike. Tasso himself was destined to experience both
the favour and the hostility, the generosity and the neglect, of this
capricious house.

Ferrara is now a dull sleepy city of less than thirty thousand
inhabitants. It is a place that continues to exist not because of its
vitality, but by the mere force of habit. Its broad deserted streets
and decaying palaces lie silent and sad in the drowsy noon sunshine,
like the aisles of a September forest. But in the days of Tasso it was
one of the gayest cities of Italy, which looked upon itself as the
centre of the world, and all beyond as mere margin. It was always
_festa_, always carnival, in Ferrara; and when the poet came to it in
his twentieth year, on the last day of October 1565, he found it one
brilliant theatre. The reigning duke, Alphonso II., had just been
married to the daughter of Ferdinand I., Emperor of Austria; and this
splendid alliance was celebrated by tournaments, balls, feasts, and
other pageantry, which transcended everything of the kind that had
previously been seen in Italy, with the exception, perhaps, of the
fetes connected with the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to his
grandfather. The ardent mind of the poet, it need hardly be said, was
completely fascinated. He saw himself surrounded daily with all the
splendours of chivalry, and lived in the midst of scenes such as haunt
the dreams of poets and inspire the pages of romance. Goethe, in his
_Torquato Tasso_, an exquisite poem, it may be said, but wanting in
dramatic action, gives a vivid picture of the poet's life at the court
of Ferrara, which bore some resemblance to his own at the court of
Weimar.

Two sisters of the reigning prince lived in the palace, and by their
beauty and accomplishments imparted to the court an air of great
refinement. The younger, the famous Leonora of Este, was about thirty
years of age at this time, and therefore considerably older than
Tasso. A severe and protracted illness had shut her out from the
festivities connected with her brother's marriage, and communicated to
her mind a touch of sadness, and to her features a spiritual delicacy
which greatly increased her attractiveness. The numerous writers by
whom she is mentioned talk with rapture, not only of her beauty and
genius,