About two years after the completion of the Jerusalem Delivered, and four years after the first representation of the Aminta;--when all Europe rung with the poet's fame, Tasso fled from the Court of Ferrara, in a fit of distraction. His frenzy was caused partly by religious horrors and scruples; partly by the petty but accumulated injuries which malignity and tyranny had heaped upon him; partly by a long-indulged and hopeless passion; and with these, other moral and physical causes combined. He fled, to hide himself and his sorrows in the arms of his sister Cornelia. The brother and sister had not met since their childish years; and Tasso, wild with misery, forlorn, and penniless, knew not what reception he was to meet with. When arrived within a league of his birthplace, Sorrento,[133] he changed clothes with a shepherd, and in this disguise appeared before his sister, as one sent with tidings of her brother's misfortunes. The recital, we may believe, was not coldly given. Cornelia, who appears to have inherited with the personal beauty, the sensibility and strong domestic affections of her mother, Portia,[134] was so violently agitated by the eloquence of the feigned messenger, that she fainted away; and Tasso was obliged to hasten the denouement by discovering himself. In the same moment he was clasped in her affectionate arms, and bathed with her tears. How often, when I have stood on my balcony at Naples, have I looked towards the white buildings of Sorrento, glittering afar upon the distant promontory, and thought upon this scene! and felt, how that which is already surpassingly beautiful to the eye, may be hallowed to the imagination by such remembrances as these! Tasso resided with his sister for three years, the object of her unwearied and tender attention. It was on his return to Ferrara, (recalled, as Manso says, by the tenor of Leonora's letters[135]) that he was imprisoned as a lunatic at St. Anne's. They show to travellers the cell in which he was confined. Over the entrance of the gallery leading to it, is written up in large letters, "Ingresso alla Prigione di Torquato Tasso," as if to blazon, in the eye of the stranger, what is at once the renown and disgrace of that fallen city. The cell itself is small, dark and low. The abhorred grate, Marring the sun-beams with its hideous shade,