Notwithstanding the jealousies of Alfonso, and the fascinations of his sisters to detain him, the capricious bard escaped from his splendid captivity to Rome,--and escaped even with the permission of the duke; who gave him a letter of recommendation to the cardinal Hippolyto, to befriend him as a stranger there, for the avowed purpose of obtaining the accustomed indulgence granted to visiters during the jubilee. Here he met with the cardinal Ferdinand de' Medici, afterwards grand duke of Tuscany, who renewed to him in person the tender of an honourable asylum (formerly intimated to him in private), should he be disposed to leave altogether the service of Alfonso. The offer was gratefully acknowledged, but not formally accepted; and after six weeks of holidays (as he felt them to be) spent in the luxury of literary intercourse, and the renewal of the impressions which the scene of Rome's posthumous glory in her magnificent ruins, and her not less imposing revival in her hierarchal pomp, had left on his mind in youth, he returned by way of Sienna and Florence to Ferrara. Here, while his poem was going through a second round of critical purgatory, and his soul was sinking under the burden of censures laid upon him, like the spirits of the proud in Dante, condemned to bear enormous stones along the uneven uphill road, he received the appointment of historiographer to the house of Este, with a small stipend, which laid upon him another cobweb obligation to remain at Ferrara. What were the duties of this office it is of no consequence to inquire; he does not seem even to have performed any, nor perhaps did he owe any; his fable of the origin of that family from his hero Rinaldo--the Rinaldo of his "Gerusalemme"--had already conferred on it more of that glory which princes covet, than the true history of all its ancestors might have done. When the results of the aforesaid second revisal of his poem were communicated to him, in despair of conciliating his critics, and determined not to yield altogether to their incompetent authority, on points where he felt himself strong in poetical power to produce the very effects which they deprecated, but which he had aimed at and achieved most triumphantly, he composed an interpretation of the whole as an extended allegory, spiritualising its heroes and its scenes, with more perverse ingenuity than felicity of success. Of this it may be fairly said, that if the original were mainly fiction, the moral was wholly so. His censors, however, persisted in condemning the voluptuous passages to which he himself was most attached, because he knew them to be the most beautiful, and recked not that they were the most seductive. In this respect the poet himself was the Rinaldo of his sorceress muse, who by her enchantments had wholly captivated his heart, and carried him away to her "limbo of vanity;" from which Sperone and Antoniano, his remorseless critics, in vain endeavoured to deliver him; as Carlo and