Many different opinions were expressed as to whether Tasso was really insane. Montaigne, who was travelling in Italy at the time of his incarceration, visited him in his cell and left a pitiable description of the apathetic misery in which he found him, as if his powers of endurance were exhausted by suffering, and nothing but the stupor of despair remained. Others pointed to the poems, the essays, the letters he wrote in captivity, and asked in indignant tones whether the author of compositions so pregnant with thought and so perfect in diction could possibly be insane? Peculiar, he undoubtedly was; but he had expiated his errors by severe suffering, and was it not reasonable to suppose that he had learnt a salutary lesson, and would not, if restored to freedom, repeat the regrettable follies of the past? This consideration, doubtless, after the lapse of so many years, inclined Alfonso to clemency, and when his brother-in-law, Vincenzo Gonzaga, interceded for the luckless poet, he did not meet with the harsh refusal given to others, but was able to boast that he alone of so many petitioners had obtained Tasso's release. The door of the cell where the author of the _Gerusalemme_ had languished for so many years was opened, and he was free to go wherever he liked. As may be imagined, he was cured of his wish to figure at the Court of Ferrara, and he left the inhospitable dominions, never to return. Vincenzo Gonzaga took him to Mantua, where he passed the time immediately following his release. But the ire-action, after so long a period of wretchedness, was too trying for his enfeebled frame. He forsook the brilliant circles of Mantua for a quieter retreat at Bergamo with some of his relatives. Here he finished his tragedy of _Torrismondo,_ begun many years previously, but thrown aside, at first because he was engaged on the arduous task of his great epic, and then because his own life drifted into a tragedy far transcending the mimic sorrows of the stage.