In whatever way that cure may have been temporarily effected, Tasso, after more than seven years' confinement, was liberated in 1586, at the special intercession of the prince of Mantua. Alfonso refused to allow him an audience, and he left Ferrara like a transport released from prison, to go into perpetual banishment; for the duke remained inexorable, and, indeed, implacable, to the end of his victim's life. For a while Tasso enjoyed the sudden transition, again being lodged in the palace of Mantua, faring sumptuously, and being admitted to the high, amiable, and intellectual society of nobles, ladies, and scholars. This pleasant season was not, however, without relapses of his fearful disease: the evil spirit came upon him at times, and all the enchantment of his harp could not drive it away. During several years afterwards, the poet wandered about, as his father had done, from city to city, and from court to court, experiencing all the vicissitudes of what is called fortune, but which, in his case, appears to have been the lot which he chose and cut out for himself. Princes were ever ready to open their doors to him, and wherever he was known, he was honoured according to the reputation which he had so painfully but unprofitably acquired; his patrons having only afforded him hospitality while he abode with them, and booksellers having been enriched at his expense by the spoils of his genius, in a country where the property of literary men in their own works was little acknowledged and less respected. His controversy with the _Della Cruscan_ academy during his imprisonment, the members of which had invidiously prejudiced the public mind against him, the living, whom their favour might have benefited, by exalting Ariosto, the dead, whom their preference could not serve,--while it grievously galled him, rather tended to spread the knowledge, and, necessarily with that knowledge, the fame of his "Gerusalemme," than permanently to injure his fair fame. But he himself, from scruples of conscience and infirmity of mind, became dissatisfied with it, and employed no small portion of his brief remaining life in remodelling it, under the title of "Gerusalemme Conquistata,"--a scheme in which he utterly miscarried. His last great poetical attempt, and worthy of him in his palmy state, was a work on the creation, entitled the "Sette Giornate" (the Seven Days), which he left unfinished. It was composed in _versi scidti_, which nearly correspond to English blank verse. There are many passages in this magnificent fragment, which were evidently so familiar to Milton's mind, that he fell into the same trains of thought, and imitated them in the style peculiar to himself, repaying as much as he borrowed, "stealing and giving odours."