This task, therefore, for fifteen years, he pursued, with occasional external interruptions, but none probably from within; for, his mind being impregnated with the great conception, he could not help brooding over it by day and by night, amidst business and pleasure, in crowds and in solitude, at Rome as ambassador from the duke to the pope, and at Ferrara as a courtier in the palace of cardinal Hippolito; but especially at his birth-place, Reggio, in the retirement of a villa belonging to one of his maternal relatives, Sigismondo Malegucci. Here, in one of the chambers of an ancient tower within the domain, he elaborated canto after canto of that most anomalous yet impressive poem, which, while it appears as unconnected as a tissue of dreams in its details, (as it resembles the stuff which dreams are made of in its materials,) is nevertheless one of the most perfect webs of narrative that fancy ever spun, or genius wove, from the silkworm produce of a poet's brain. No rival composition of the same or any other class of heroic verse has yet proved equally attractive to Italian readers in every rank of life; though, in the "Gerusalemme Liberata" of Tasso, consummate skill and genius of the highest order have constructed an epic according to the strictest rules of art, to conciliate the learned, and at the same time embellished it with all the graces of romance, to charm the multitude, who love to be pleased, because they cannot help it, and care not by what means, so that these be but "rich and strange."