"Torquato Tasso, a Bergamasque not merely by origin, but by affection, having first lost his father's inheritance and his mother's dowry.... and (after the bondage of many years and the fatigues of a very long period) having not yet lost, in the midst of so much misery, the faith which he has in this city, ventures to ask its assistance. Let it conjure the Duke of Ferrara, once my benefactor and protector, to restore me to my country, my family and myself. The unfortunate Tasso therefore beseeches Your Lordships to send Monsignore Licino or some other to treat for my deliverance. The memory of their kindness will not end until after my life.
"Di VV. SS. affezionatissimo servidore,
"Torquato Tasso.
"Prigione e infermo nel ospedal di Sant' Anna in Ferrera."
Tasso was refused ink, pens, or paper. He had sung the "magnanimous Alphonsus," and the magnanimous Alphonsus thrust into a madman's cell him who had shed imperishable lustre on his ungrateful head. In a most graceful sonnet, the prisoner beseeches a cat to lend him the brightness of its eyes to replace the light of which he has been deprived; a harmless raillery which proves the poet's gentleness and the excess of his distress:
Fatemi luce a scriver queste carmi.
At night, Tasso imagined that he heard strange noises, the tolling of funeral knells. Ghosts tormented him:
"I am worn out," he cried, "I succumb!"
Attacked by a serious illness, he thought that he saw the Virgin save him by a miracle:
Egrio io languiva, e d'alto, sonno avvinto.
. . . . . . . .
Giacea con guancia di pallor dipinta,
Quando di luce incoronata . . .
Maria, pronta scendesti al mio dolore.
Montaigne visited Tasso reduced to this excess of adversity and showed him no compassion. At the same time, Camoens was ending his life in an alms-house in Lisbon: what consoled him, as he lay dying on a pallet? The verses of the prisoner of Ferrara. The captive author of the Gerusalemme, admiring the mendicant author of the Lusiadas, said to Vasco de Gama:
Tant' oltre stende il glorioso volo
Che i tuoi spalmate legni andar men lungo.
Thus did the voice from the Eridanus resound on the banks of the Tagus; thus did two illustrious sufferers of a like genius and a like destiny congratulate each other across the seas, from hospital to hospital, putting mankind to shame.