The important period of his life begins in 1565, when he went to Ferrara, then, as in the days of Boiardo and Ariosto, the center of a rich and brilliant court. His life here for the next seven or eight years was a prosperous one. Fortune seemed to have showered her fairest gifts on this young, handsome, and gentle-mannered poet. He was treated on terms of intimacy by the duke and his sisters, Lucretia and Leonora. He was accustomed to take his meals with the two ladies, and to them he read the poetry which he wrote from time to time. It was undoubtedly due to their influence that he composed his famous pastoral poem, Aminta (1572-73), full of exquisite pictures of rural life and bathed in an atmosphere of tender and refined love. This poem had an unprecedented success and made its author famous throughout all Europe. Not long after this, however, the first germs of the terrible mental disease which wrecked his life began to show themselves. For many years Tasso was made the hero of a romance, in which he was depicted as a martyr to social caste--the victim of his own love for a woman beyond his sphere. According to this romance Tasso fell in love with the sister of the duke of Ferrara, and for this crime was shut up in prison and falsely treated as insane. The results of modern scholarship, however, have dissipated the sentimental halo from the brow of the unfortunate poet, and reduced his case to one of pathological diagnosis. Leonora was some ten years older than Tasso, and the affection which at first undoubtedly existed between them was that of an elder sister and a younger brother. The duke was not cruel to Tasso, but on the contrary treated him at first kindly, and only when he was at last worn out by the vagaries of the poet, did he drop him and bother himself no more about him. The secret of Tasso's sufferings and vicissitudes of fortune lay in himself; he was, during the latter part of his life, simply insane. All his actions during this period illustrate perfectly the various phases of the persecution mania, which in his case was aggravated by religious hallucination. To this terrible mental disease he was predisposed from early life; his Jesuit education, the mysterious death of his mother (suspected of having been poisoned), overwork and worriment, and especially his morbidly sensitive and melancholy temperament, all helped to prepare the way for the catastrophe that was to darken his life.