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244 unquestionably maniacal; but his state gradually became one of apparent sanity infested by delusions, to which many of the painful particulars alleged in his letters are to be ascribed. One prevailing hallucination was the frequent visitation of a familiar spirit, with whom he held long dialogues. His treatment improved with his mental condition; though sometimes, by the inattention of his custodians, as we must think, short of necessary food, he had comfortable apartments, was allowed to carry on an extensive and apparently uncontrolled correspondence, and produced enough excellent work, chiefly prose dialogues, to prove at least the enjoyment of numerous lucid intervals. At length, in July 1586, he was permitted to retire to Mantua. Alphonso appears to have behaved becomingly to the poet, considered merely as an unhappy vassal: it is no special reproach to him to have been neither an Alexander the Great nor a Wolfe to rightly appraise the comparative worth of the Jerusalem Delivered and the ducal crown of Ferrara.

The remainder of Tasso's life was spent in restless wanderings to and fro between courts and cities, like the tossings of a sick man who vainly seeks ease by shifting his position upon his couch. He could not live without a patron, and no patron long contented him. I would be tedious to tell how often he forsook and resought Mantua, Florence, Rome, Naples; he even made overtures of reconciliation to Ferrara. It was not his fault, but sheer mental infirmity, by which, however, his reason, though, frequently obscured or misled, was never again overthrown. At Naples his friend Manso heard a profound argument between him and his familiar spirit; both voices were his own, but of this Tasso was unconscious. He had completed and published his