Tasso's self-chosen critics suggested every course but the right one, which was to publish the Gerusalemme without further dis pute. Tasso, already overworked by his precocious studies, by exciting court-life and exhausting literary industry, now grew almost mad with worry. His health began to fail him. He com plained of headache, suffered from malarial fevers, and wished to leave Ferrara. The Gerusalemme was laid aside in manuscript for a time. He opened negotiations with the court of Florence for an exchange of service. This irritated the duke of Ferrara, who feared that the Medici might get the coveted dedication of that already famous epic. Therefore he bore with the poet's humours. Mean while Tasso became the subject of delusions—thought that his servants betrayed his confidence, fancied he had been denounced to the Inquisition, expected daily to be poisoned. In 1576 he quarrelled with a Ferrarese gentleman, Maddalo, who had talked too freely about some love affair; in the summer of 1577 he was relating his sorrows once more to the princess Lucrezia, when he imagined a servant was listening and rushed on him, knife in hand. He was shut up in a room in the palace, and the duke then took him to his country seat of Belriguardo. The often told story, im mortalized by Goethe, that a compromising liaison with Leonora d'Este came to light, and that Tasso agreed to feign madness in order to cover her honour, must be dismissed. The poet's own temperament and the critics of his Gerusalemme Liberata had aggravated his ill-health. He was now placed in a Franciscan con vent at Ferrara. He escaped at the end of July, disguised him self as a peasant and went on foot to his sister Cornelia at Sorrento.
He seems to have found peace and healing with his sister, but after a time missed the court circle, and asked to return to Ferrara. There his old irritability returned. In the summer of 1578 he ran away again ; travelled through Mantua, Padua, Venice, Urbino, Lombardy. In September he reached Turin on foot, and was courteously entertained by the duke of Savoy. Wherever he went, "wandering like the world's rejected guest," he met with the honour due to his illustrious name. But life was intolerable to him outside Ferrara. In February 1579 he returned at an ill-chosen moment. Alfonso was about to contract his third marriage, this time with a princess of the house of Mantua. The princesses did not want to see him. The duke was engaged. Tasso broke into terms of open abuse, and was sent off without ceremony to the madhouse of St. Anna. There he remained for seven years until July 1586. After the first few months of his incarceration, during which he was treated with the harshness then usual towards the insane, he obtained spacious apartments, received his friends, and went abroad attended by friends. Except for occasional odes or sonnets—some written at request and only rhetorically inter esting, a few, like the famous canzone asking for the intercession of Lucrezia and Leonora, inspired by his keen sense of suffering and therefore poignant—he neglected poetry.
Long ago his papers had been sequestrated. Now, in 158o, he heard that part of the Gerusalemme was being published without his permission and without his corrections. Next year the whole poem was given to the world, and in the following six months seven editions appeared. The prisoner had no control over his editors ; and from the masterpiece which placed him on the level of Petrarch and Ariosto he never derived one penny of pecuniary profit. The fame of the poem rapidly spread throughout Europe; within twenty years of its publication it was translated into English in the well-known version, itself a masterpiece, of Sir Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem (I600). A rival poet at the court of Ferrara, Battista Guarini, undertook to revise and re-edit his lyrics in 1582. In 1585, two Florentine pedants of the Della Crusca academy declared war against the Gerusalemme.
In 1586 Tasso left St. Anna at the solicitation of Vincenzo Gonzaga, prince of Mantua. He followed his young deliverer to the city by the Mincio, basked awhile in liberty and courtly pleasures, enjoyed a splendid reception from his paternal town of Bergamo, and produced a tragedy called Torrismondo, the first sketch of which dates from 1574. But in the autumn of 1587 we find him wandering once more, through Bologna and Loreto to Rome, where he stayed in the house of an old friend, Scipione Gonzaga, now patriarch of Jerusalem. Next year he wandered off to Naples, where he wrote his unfinished poem on Monte Oliveto. In 1589 he returned to Rome, but fell ill. The patriarch in 1590 again received him. But Tasso's restless spirit drove him forth to Florence. The Florentines said, "Achim est de eo." Rome once more, then Mantua, then Florence, then Rome, then Naples, then Rome, then Naples—such is the weary record of the years 159o 94. We have to study a veritable Odyssey of malady, indigence and misfortune.
In 1594 Clement VIII. and his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini of St. Giorgio, invited Tasso to Rome. There he was to assume the crown of bays, as Petrarch had assumed it, on the Capitol. Worn out with illness, Tasso reached Rome in November. The ceremony of his coronation was deferred because Cardinal Aldo brandini had fallen ill. But the pope assigned him a pension; and, under the pressure of pontifical remonstrance, Prince Avellino, who held Tasso's maternal estate, agreed to discharge a portion of his claims by payment of a yearly rent-charge. Fortune came too late. Before the crown was worn or the pensions paid he ascended to the convent of St. Onofrio, on a stormy April in 1595. Seeing a cardinal's coach toil up the steep Trasteverine Hill, the monks came to the door to greet it. From the carriage stepped Tasso, the Odysseus of many wanderings and miseries, the singer of sweetest strains still vocal, and told the prior he was come to die.
He passed away on April 25, 1595, and the cell he occupied became a place of pilgrimage for his admirers. The last twenty years of his existence had been ineffectual. At the age of thirty one the Gerusalemme, as we have it, was accomplished. The world, too, was already ringing with the music of Aminta. More than this Tasso had not to give to literature. But those succeeding years of derangement, exile, imprisonment, poverty and hope de ferred endear the man to us. (J. A. S. ; X.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The best edition of Tasso's works is that of Rosini 33 vols. (Pisa, 1821-32) ; C. Guasti has edited the prose works 2 vols. (Florence, 1875) and the letters 5 vols. (Florence, 1853). English translations of Gerusalemme include the often reprinted translation by Sir Edward Fairfax (i600) and that by J. K. James (1884). One of the earliest translations of the Aminta was that of Abraham Fraunce (1591) ; the latest is that by E. Grillo (1924). G. Grinnell-Milne has published Tales from Tasso and other translations (1909). See also Manso's Vita in Rosini's edition oI the works ; Serassi's Vita (Bergamo, 1790) ; Solerti, Vita di Tasso 2 vols. (Rome, 1895) and also his editions of Le Rime di T. Tasso 4 vols (Bologna, 1898-1902) and Gerusalemme Liberata 3 vols. (Florence, 1895-96) ; W. Boulting, Tasso and his Times (1907) ; E. Donadoni, T. Tasso 2 vols. (Florence, 1921) and A. D'Amato, Studi sul Tasso e sul Maazoni (Piacenza, 1924).