Torquatus Tasso died about the forty-fifth year of his age, a man of a wonderful and prodigious wit, who was seized with an incurable fury in his youth, when he lived at the court of Ferrara, and nevertheless, in lucid intervals, he writ many things both in verse and prose, with so much judgment, elegancy, and extreme correctness of style, that he turned at length that pity which many men had conceived for him, into an amazement; while by that fury, which, in others, makes their minds outrageous or dulls them, after it was over, his understanding became as it were more purified, more ready in inventing things, more acute in aptly disposing them after they were invented, and more copious in adorning them with choice words and weight of sentences; and that which a man of the soundest sense would scarce excogitate at his leisure, with the greatest labour and care imaginable, he, after a violent agitation of the mind set beside itself, naturally performed with a wonderful felicity, so that he did not seem struck with an alienation of mind, but with a divine fury. He that knows not these things, which all men know that have been in Italy, and concerning which himself sometimes complains, though modestly, in his writings; let him read his divine works, and he must necessarily conclude, either that I speak of another man than Tasso, or that these things were written by another man than Tasso. After having given my readers so many memorable accounts concerning the perception men have had in all ages, and still continue to have of genii or familiar spirits, by all the senses, as seeing, hearing, &c., which accounts have been attested by men of the greatest learning and quality, if any of them still remain dissatisfied, I am contented, and desire them, for their punishment, to lay down the book before they arrive at the more pleasant parts of it, which are yet to come, and not to read one tittle farther. These unbelieving gentlemen shall then be at liberty, according as their different spirits dictate, to ridicule me in the same manner as many more learned and greater men than I have been satirized, before my time, by persons of a like infidel temper, who would fain pass incredulity upon the world as wisdom; and they may, with all the freedom in nature, bestow upon me those merry appellations which, I very well know such extraordinary freethinkers imagine to belong of right, to any author, that either believes himself, or would possess the world with an opinion and belief, that there is such a thing as the holding commerce and conversation in this habitable world with genii, and familiar spirits. I shall only first tell them all I have to say to terminate the dispute between them and me.