How many kings, great men and fools, drowned to-day in oblivion, but believing themselves, towards the close of the sixteenth century, persons worthy of remembrance, were ignorant of the very names of Tasso and Camoens! In 1754, for the first time, was read "the name of Washington, in the account of an obscure combat delivered in the back-woods between a troop of French, English and savages[181]: which clerk at Versailles, which purveyor to the Parc-aux-Cerfs, which man, above all, of the Court or the Academy would have cared, at that time, to change names with that American planter[182]?"
Ferrara, 18 September 1833.
Envy hastened to spread its poison over open wounds. The Accademia della Crusca declared that "the Gerusalemme Liberata was a cold and heavy compilation, obscure and unequal in style, full of ridiculous lines and barbarous words, with no single beauty to redeem its innumerable defects."
A fanatical love for Ariosto dictated that verdict. But the shout of popular admiration drowned the academic blasphemies: it was no longer possible for Duke Alphonsus to prolong the captivity of a man who was guilty only of singing that captivity. The Pope[183] claimed the deliverance from the honour of Italy.
Tasso's release.
Tasso was released from prison[184], but none the happier for it Leonora was dead. He dragged himself from town to town with his sorrows. At Loretto, ready to die with hunger, he was on the point, says one of his biographers, "of taking up the hand that had built Armida's palace."
In Naples, he experienced some of the sweet sentiment of country:
E donde
Partii fanciullo, or dopo tanti lustri
Torno . . . . . .
Canuto ed egro alle native sponde.
He preferred to sumptuous abodes a cell at the Convent of Montoliveto. During a journey which he took to Rome, fever having laid hold of him, a hospital was once more his refuge.
Returning from Rome and Florence to Naples, laying the blame of his ills on his immortal poem, he rewrote it and spoilt it. He commenced his cantos, Delle sette Giornato del Monde Creato, a subject treated by Du Bartas[185]. Tasso makes Eve issue from Adam's bosom, while God: