must be left to those who are skilled in the mysteries of love-making between unequal parties. On this subject, as on the poet's strange melancholy, and the severity with which it was visited by his patron, whether for the punishment of the lover or the cure of the maniac, it would be futile to argue here. After all the explanation and mystification by Tasso's biographers, the general impression has been, is, and probably will remain, that his love for Leonora was real; that his imprisonment was vindictive on the part of her brother, and that his frenzy was the effect of hopeless passion and impotent resentment against oppression. "Historians," says Ugo Foscolo, "will be ever embarrassed to explain aright the reasons of Tasso's imprisonment: it is involved in the same obscurity as the exile of Ovid. Both were among those thunder-strokes that despotism darts forth. In crushing their victims they terrified them, and reduced spectators to silence. There are incidents in courts, that, although known to many persons, remain in eternal oblivion--contemporaries dare not reveal, and posterity can only divine them." In the following summer, Tasso, bewildered and desperate, and not knowing whither to turn, or in whom to confide, at length fled secretly from Ferrara to visit his sister at Torrento, whom he had not seen since they were children together. She was now a widow, the mother of two sons, and dependent upon her uncles, who still withheld her mother's dowry, for the means of subsistence. With that caution to do every thing by stealth, which characterises the hallucination of one who fancies all the world conspiring to do him harm, he presented himself before her in the habit of a shepherd, affecting to be the bearer of certain letters from himself. He found her alone; her children being absent. The letters represented her brother at Ferrara as surrounded by enemies, and in the most imminent danger of his life, unless she interposed in his behalf, and rescued him from their machinations. When she had read the distressing intelligence, she implored the supposed messenger to tell her all, the worst, at once. He answered by a recital of miseries so aggravated, in a tone so earnest and impassioned, that, whether she suspected him or not, she fainted with alarm. When she had been sufficiently recovered, the cunning minstrel changed the hand that played upon her, like Timotheus on his harp, and, from excess of pity for her brother's sufferings, gently awoke all her tenderness of affection, by old and beautiful recollections of former days, and hopes yet possible to be realised in years to come. At length, when she was well prepared, he discovered himself fully to her, and they were brother and sister again in a moment, and thenceforth to the end of life. With her he remained in comparative tranquillity for several months, being all the while unacknowledged in the neighbourhood, except as Cornelia's