[176] [In a letter written to his friend Scipio Gonzaga ("Di prizione in Sant' Anna, questo mese di mezzio l'anno 1579"), Tasso exclaims, "Ah, wretched me! I had designed to write, besides two epic poems of most noble argument, four tragedies, of which I had formed the plan. I had schemed, too, many works in prose, on subjects the most lofty, and most useful to human life; I had designed to unite philosophy with eloquence, in such a manner that there might remain of me an eternal memory in the world. Alas! I had expected to close my life with glory and renown; but now, oppressed by the burden of so many calamities, I have lost every prospect of reputation and of honour. The fear of perpetual imprisonment increases my melancholy; the indignities which I suffer augment it; and the squalor of my beard, my hair, and habit, the sordidness and filth, exceedingly annoy me. Sure am I, that, if she who so little has corresponded to my attachment--if she saw me in such a state, and in such affliction--she would have some compassion on me."--_Lettere di Torouato Tasso_, 1853, ii. 60.] [177] {144}[Compare-- "The second of a tenderer sadder mood, Shall pour his soul out o'er Jerusalem." _Prophecy of Dante_, Canto IV. lines 136, 137.] [178] [Tasso's imprisonment in the Hospital of Sant' Anna lasted from March, 1579, to July, 1586. The _Gerusalemme_ had been finished many years before. He sent the first four cantos to his friend Scipio Gonzaga, February 17, and the last three on October 4, 1575 (_Lettere di Torquato Tasso_, 1852, i. 55-117). A mutilated first edition was published in 1580 by "Orazio _alias_ Celio de' Malespini, avventuriere intrigante" (Solerti's _Vita, etc._, 1895, i. 329).] [179] [So, too, Gibbon was overtaken by a "sober melancholy" when he had finished the last line of the last page of the _Decline and Fall_ on the night of June 27, 1787.] [180] {145}[Not long after his imprisonment, Tasso appealed to the mercy of Alfonso, in a canzone of great beauty, ... and ... in another ode to the princesses, whose pity he invoked in the name of their own mother, who had herself known, if not the like horrors, the like solitude of imprisonment, and bitterness of soul, made a similar appeal. (See _Life of Tasso_, by John Black, 1810, ii. 64, 408.) Black prints the canzone in full; Solerti (_Vita, etc._, i. 316-318) gives selections.] [181] {146}["For nearly the first year of his confinement Tasso endured all the horrors of a solitary sordid cell, and was under the care of a gaoler whose chief virtue, although he was a poet and a man of letters, was a cruel obedience to the commands of his prince.... His name was Agostino Mosti.... Tasso says of him, in a letter to his sister, 'ed usa meco ogni sorte di rigore ed inumanità.'"--Hobhouse, _Historical Illustrations, etc_., 1818, pp. 20, 21, note 1.