n composition, but still entreated; he occasionally
reproached and even bantered the duke in some of his letters to his
friends, all of which, doubtless, were opened; but still he entreated,
flattered, adored, all to no purpose, for seven long years and upwards.
In time he became subject to maniacal illusions; so that if he was not
actually mad before, he was now considered so. He was not only visited
with sights and sounds, such as many people have experienced whose brains
have been over-excited, but he fancied himself haunted by a sprite, and
become the sport of "magicians." The sprite stole his things, and the
magicians would not let him get well. He had a vision such as Benvenuto
Cellini had, of the Virgin Mary in her glory; and his nights were so
miserable, that he ate too much in order that he might sleep. When he
was temperate, he lay awake. Sometimes he felt "as if a horse had thrown
himself on him." "Have pity on me," he says to the friend to whom he
gives these affecting accounts; "I am miserable, because the world is
unjust."[13]

The physicians advised him to leave off wine; but he says he could not do
that, though he was content to use it in moderation. In truth he required
something to support him against the physicians themselves, for they
continued to exhaust his strength by their medicines, and could not
supply the want of it with air and freedom. He had ringings in the ears,
vomits, and fluxes of blood. It would be ludicrous, if it were not
deplorably pathetic, to hear so great a man, in the commonest
medical terms, now protesting against the eternal drenches of these
practitioners, now humbly submitting to them, and now entreating like a
child, that they might at least not be "so bitter." The physicians, with
the duke at their head, were as mad for their rhubarbs and lancets as the
quacks in Moliere; and nothing but the very imagination that had nearly
sacrificed the poet's life to their ignorance could have hindered
him from dashing his head against the wall, and leaving them to the
execrations of posterity. It is the only occasion in which the noble
profession of medicine has not appeared in wise and beneficent connexion
with the sufferings of men of letters. Why did Ferrara possess no
Brocklesby in those days? no Garth, Mead, Warren, or Southwood Smith?

Tasso enabled himself to endure his imprisonment with composition. He
supported it with his poetry and his poem, and what, alas! he had been
too