everywhere admired as one of the great classics of the world.

For nine years Tasso lived after his imprisonment. But his free life
was only a little less burdensome than his prison one. With impaired
health and extinguished hope, and only the wreck of his great
intellect, he wandered a homeless pilgrim from court to court, drawn
like a moth to the brilliant flame that had wrought his ruin. Well
would it have been for him had he settled down to some quiet
independent pursuit that would have taken him away from the atmosphere
of court life altogether, such as the Professorship of Poetry and
Ethics which had been offered to him by the Genoese Academy. But the
habits of a whole lifetime could not now be given up. His education
and training had fitted him for no other mode of life. Without the
patronage of the great, literature in those days had not a chance of
success; and a thousand incidents in the life of Tasso serve to show
that "genius was considered the property, not of the individual, but
of his patron"; and with petty meanness was the reward allotted for
this appropriation dealt out. His experience of the favour of princes
at this period was only a repetition of his own earlier one, and that
of his father. His patrons, one after another, got tired of him; and
yet he persisted in soliciting their favour. From the door of his
former friend, Cardinal Gonzaga, at Rome, he was turned away; and as a
fever-stricken mendicant he sought refuge in the Bergamese Hospital of
that city, founded by a relative of his own, who little thought that
it would one day afford an asylum to the most illustrious of his name.

But fate had now discharged its last evil arrow, and began to relent
during the two remaining years of his life. The sun that was all day
obscured, as it struggled with dark clouds, emerged at last, and made
the western sky ablaze with splendour. All over the country nothing
was to be heard but the echoes of Tasso's praises. From the fountains
of the Adige to the Straits of Messina, in the valleys of Savoy, and
in the capitals of Spain and France, his immortal epic was read or
recited by the highest and the lowest. Fortunes were made by its sale.
The famous bandit Sciarra, who with his troop of robbers had terrified
the whole of Southern Italy, hearing that Tasso was at Gaeta, on his
journey from Naples to Rome, sent to compliment him, and offer him,
not only a free passage, but protection by the way. At Florence,