ed her there can be but little
doubt, but hardly to the verge of madness, as he wrote love sonnets to
other ladies at the same time; the truth seems to be that he became
mentally unbalanced as the result of the precocious development of his
powers, which made a man of him while yet a boy and developed in him an
intensity of feeling which made his candle of life burn fiercely, but
for a short time only. His end was but the natural consequence of the
beginning, and whether Leonora helped or hindered in the final result,
it matters not, for she was blameless. She died in the second year of
Tasso's imprisonment, sad at heart as she had ever been, never deeply
touched by the poet's constant praises, and to the end a victim to that
melancholy mood which had come upon her in childhood.

CHAPTER X

THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

The transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century in Italy
was marked by no sudden changes of any kind. The whole country was
thoroughly prostrate and under the control of the empire; a national
spirit did not exist, and the people seemed content to slumber on
without opposing in any way the tyranny of their foreign masters. The
glory of the Italian Renaissance had been sung in all the countries of
Europe; in every nook and corner of the continent, Italian painters and
sculptors, princes and poets, artists and artisans of all kinds, had
stimulated this new birth of the world; but this mission accomplished,
Italy seemed to find little more to do, and for lack of an ideal her
sons and daughters wasted their time in the pursuit of idle things. It
was the natural reaction after an age of unusual force and brilliancy.
In the shadow of the great achievements of the sixteenth century in all
lines of human activity, the seventeenth, lost in admiration, could
imagine no surer way to equal attainment than to imitate what had gone
before. Literature became stilted and full of mannerisms and underwent a
process of refinement which left it without strength or vigor, and
society in general seemed more concerned with form and ceremony than
with the deeper things of the spirit.

Countless examples are on record to show the petty jealousies which were
agitating the public mind at this time, and the number of quarrels and
arguments which had their origin in most trivial causes passes belief.
Rank and position were of the utmost consequence, and questions of
precedence in public functions