onferred
upon him in happier days,--a favour which Alfonso, to his eternal
disgrace, refused to grant.

At first Tasso took up his abode at the court of the Duke of Mantua,
whose son, Vincenzo Gonzaga, had been the principal instrument in his
release, on the occasion of his marriage with the sister of Alfonso of
Ferrara. This Vincenzo Gonzaga is shown by the light of history in two
opposite characters: as the generous friend and patron of Tasso, and
as the pupil of the Admirable Crichton, who in a midnight brawl slew
his tutor in circumstances of the utmost baseness and treachery. For a
while Tasso was treated with great kindness at Mantua, but, the father
dying, the son no sooner ascended the ducal throne than, with the
capriciousness peculiar to Italian princes, he turned his back upon
the poet whom he had formerly befriended. The incident I have
mentioned would have prepared us for this dastardly conduct; the evil
side of his nature, which was kept in abeyance during his political
pupilage, assuming the predominance on his accession to power. Tasso's
proud spirit could not endure the neglect of his once ardent friend,
and he set out again into the cold inhospitable world, imploring in
his great poverty from a former patron the loan of ten scudi, to pay
the expenses of his journey to Rome. On the way he turned aside to
make a pilgrimage to Loretto, in order to satisfy that earnest
religious feeling which had been the inspiration of his genius, but
the bane of his life. The searching scrutinies and the solemn
acquittals of the inquisitors of Bologna, Ferrara, and the great
tribunal of Rome itself, had not satisfied his morbid mind. And he
thought that he might get that peace of conscience which nothing else
could give by a visit to the Casa Santa--the house of the Virgin Mary
at Loretto. Worn out by the long journey, which he made in the old
fashion on foot, he knelt in prayer before the magnificent shrine; and
thus, admitted as it were within the domestic enclosure of the holy
household, he felt that the Blessed Virgin had given him that calmness
and repose of heart which he had not known since he had prayed as a
boy beside his mother's knee. Strengthened by the successful
accomplishment of his vow, he went on to Rome; but the stern Sixtus
V., who was now upon the Papal throne, was too much occupied with the
architectural reconstruction of Rome, and with the suppression of
brigandage in the Papal States, to bestow an