In these times literary advertisements were unknown, but the reputation of a forthcoming work was heralded by a scarcely less effectual expedient. Passages of it were handed about in manuscript among literary circles, and criticisms were requested from the author's more intimate friends. Thus was it with the _Amadigi_; and Bernardo has not shrunk from giving to the world the letters by which he sought for or replied to such suggestions. Dionigi Atanagi was summoned from Cagli by the Duke, for the purpose of making those verbal corrections which were rendered irksome to the poet by weak sight. Sperone Speroni writes to the author that, in two revisions, he had removed the vulgarisms, roughnesses, and redundancies, cancelling above two hundred stanzas, and that, in a third reading, he would probably delete as many more. The first conception was that of a regular epic; but the cold reception which it met with from his friends induced Bernardo to adopt a manner more conformable to the romantic and less fettered taste of the age. In the summer of 1557 he read a canto each night, at Urbino, to the Duchess Vittoria and a select audience. Having thus raised public anticipation, the poet was anxious to reap the fruits of his labours in honour and emolument; but he found a double difficulty in obtaining the 500 scudi required for the expense of an edition, and in procuring the papal licence without having the work submitted regularly to the censure. At length, in 1560, it issued, by the aid of Guidobaldo, from the press of Giolito, at Venice, in which town Tasso had chiefly resided for eighteen months, and where he, for a short time, acted as secretary to a literary academy, established in 1558, before which he read his Essay on Poetry. His remaining years produced few incidents. After an ineffectual overture to take service at the court of Savoy, he became chief secretary to the Duke of Mantua, who made him governor of Ostiglia. There he died on the 4th of September, 1569; and the epitaph penned by his son, but never placed over his ashes, runs thus:-- Erected by his son Torquato to BERNARDO TASSO, Distinguished for the fertility and eminence of his genius, in the relaxation of poetry and in the affairs of princes, in both of which he has left memorials of his industry, as well as for the fickleness and inconstancy of his fortunes. He lived LXXVI. years, and died IV Sept. MDLXIX.