But in the meantime the literary talks went on, led by her brilliant daughters, who contented themselves with topics that were less explosive. Tasso said that Lucrezia and Leonora d’Este were “so well versed in affairs of State and literature that no one could listen to their conversation without amazement.” Here, as elsewhere, they talked a great deal about matters of sentiment. Tasso held a controversy at the academy on “Fifty Points of Love.” One of them was a question whether men or women love the more constantly and intensely. Orsini Cavaletti, a lady of distinction in literature and philosophy, claimed the palm for her own sex, and came off with equal if not superior honors before a learned and brilliant audience. What the other points were I do not know. The amount of energy expended on such trivial themes was curiously illustrated a few years before by Isotta Nogarola, a lady of Verona, who discussed with learned men the question as to whether Adam or Eve was the more guilty, and wrote a defense of Eve which must have created more than a ripple of interest, as it was printed a century afterward. This champion of justice was not a reformer nor an _emancipée_, but a woman of rank and a friend of popes, who had the courage to come to the rescue of her sex from the denunciations of ages. Doubtless the discussion was largely a play of wit and an exercise in analysis that applied itself to small things, since it was not safe to attack great ones. But our unfortunate poet did not confine himself to theory, and love proved a more disastrous subject for him than did religion for some of his friends. It was to this same brilliant Leonora, whom he lauded to the skies, that Tasso dared lift his eyes in too familiar or ambitious a fashion before he was shut out of the world seven years as a madman. Whatever the facts of this tragical romance may have been, we know that the lady died at forty-five, in the odor of sanctity and unmarried, while her gayer but equally clever sister became the wife of the last Duke of Urbino, whom she found so dull and tiresome that she returned after three years to her brother’s court, where the livelier tastes were more to her liking. But its glories had already paled and its stars had mostly set. Tasso was the last. The traveler of to-day looks with curious eye on the faded splendors of the grim old castle, and speculates idly upon the tragedies that have been acted within its silent walls. But he goes away to the poor little cell at the hospital of St. Anna and drops a tear over the fate of the poet who ate his heart out there. Time brings strange reparations, but they are always too late. V