During this visit the youth was attacked by a dangerous illness, from which being rescued by the skill of a physician named Coppino, the grateful father rewarded the doctor with the fee of a stanza to his honour in a new poem, entitled "Floridante," which the aged minstrel, whom no medicine could cure of the disease of rhyme, was composing in his seventy-third year. This daughter, as she might be called, of his "Amadigi," to which it is a sequel, and his own last child of imagination, proved as short-lived as its romantic, and almost as its natural, parent, though the dutiful Torquato endeavoured himself to revive it, in his own dark days; but "Floridante," of whom it could not be said that "she had no poet," died though she had two, and those of no mean name. Bernardo Tasso himself survived for five years, dying in 1669, at the age of seventy-six. However undervalued by posterity, he was unquestionably the greatest poet who had appeared between Ariosto and his son Torquato. About this time Torquato received an intimation that the cardinal d'Este, brother to the duke of Ferrara, had nominated him one of his personal attendants, and expected him forthwith in that city. Notwithstanding the warnings of his father's old friend, Sperone, and afterwards his own, Zoilus, who, exasperated by the disappointment of hopes of preferment which he had cherished when he went to Rome, gave loose to the most violent invectives against courts and courtiers, and earnestly dissuaded Torquato from trusting himself where nothing but allurements to ruin would be placed in his way, from which it was hardly possible for virtue to escape unscathed or uncorrupted, the young poet, however, determined not to profit by the experience of the old one, but to learn for himself what experience alone can teach, and what he indeed learned at an awful cost in the issue. He resolutely, therefore, determined to put both his virtue and his fortune to the hazard of temptation, not doubting that he could secure the former and advance the latter, where the most illustrious court in Italy was held by a descendant of the patron of Ariosto. Accordingly he hastened to Ferrara, anticipating every thing that _never_ came to pass, except the one thing on which, indeed, his mind was most bent, that there he should complete his contemplated epic, and establish a name which should associate him with the most renowned of his predecessors. What a bright morning was that, forerunning a day of darkness and despair, on which he entered the city, happily unsuspecting the troubles that awaited him there! The kings of England, of the house of Hanover, are lineally descended from the family of Este. These much celebrated princes, in the best period of their ascendency, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were the magnificent, if not the liberal, patrons of most of the men of genius in the finer arts who were contemporary with them; and none was