Tasso, soon tiring of Mantua, and even languishing for Ferrara, though never permitted to return thither, wore away the residue of his desultory life, principally at Bergamo, Florence, Rome, and Naples. In the latter city (his sister being dead), when it was too late for him to enjoy the possession of it, he recovered his mother's long-disputed dowry, or such a portion of it as, at an earlier period, might have rendered him independent of those eleemosynary supplies from precarious hands, on which he generally subsisted. About the same time the pope also settled a pension upon him, and consented to allow him the honour of a coronation, such as had been granted to Petrarch, two centuries before. But wealth and honour, such as mortal hands could confer or withhold at pleasure, came too late for him. In his latter years, too, he became acquainted with Manso, marquis of Villa, his last patron, and his first biographer; known in this country as, in his old age, befriending our Milton, then a youth, on his travels in Italy, as, in his own youth, he had befriended Tasso sinking to the grave under premature decay. One of the most remarkable circumstances of the last days of Tasso was the imagination, that he was occasionally visited by a spirit--not the mischievous Robin-good-fellow of his prison, but a being of far higher dignity, with whom, alone or in company, he could hold sublime and preternatural discourse, though of the two interlocutors none present could see or hear more than the poet himself, rapt into ecstasy, and uttering language and sentiments worthy of one who, with his bodily, yet marvellously enlightened eyes and purged ears, could distinguish the presence and the voice of his mysterious visitant. Manso gives a strange account of such an interview, when he himself stood by, yet perceived nothing but the half-part which the poet acted in the scene.