Something has been said of the history of this poem. It was begun in his youth, was continued during his stay at the Court of Ferrara, was read in parts to his patrons, and subjected to the criticism of friends. The desire to secure the honour of the dedication for the house of Este, which had already patronised Ariosto, is said, very plausibly, to have had a good deal to do with the Duke’s long-suffering towards the author. When published it was made the excuse for a dispute between the Academies which overran all Italy in the sixteenth century, and were already become the homes of mere word-splitting. The _Jerusalem_ in fact became almost an affair of State at Ferrara. Its publication in a very inaccurate form in a pirated edition during his imprisonment was one of the most bitter, and certainly not the least genuine, of the grievances of a poet who had an artistic care about the execution of the work he published. The pirated edition bore the name which Tasso had chosen, _Godfrey of Boulogne_, but which he changed for _Gerusalemme Liberata_ in the first authorised edition of 1581. Under the influence of the fretful piety of his later years he made his ill-advised recension, to which he gave the name of _Gerusalemme Conquistata_. [SN: _The_ Gerusalemme Liberata.] The enduring popularity of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ in Italy has been vouched for by such well-known stories as that which tells how it was sung by gondoliers and country people even into this century. Ugo Foscolo has recorded that he heard a passage chanted by galley-slaves. Its acceptance among poets and men of letters, both in the sixteenth century and since, is not a matter of legend. Milton admired Tasso, and Spenser did him the signal honour of direct imitation. Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss, and indeed the final adventure of Sir Guyon and the Palmer in the Second Book of the _Faërie Queen_, are modelled on, and in some passages are taken directly from, the description of the garden of Armida, and the rescue of Rinaldo in the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of the _Jerusalem_. The poem was three times translated in whole or in part into English before 1600, and one of these versions, Fairfax’s, has been given rank as a classic.[118]