Ferrara is now a dull sleepy city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants. It is a place that continues to exist not because of its vitality, but by the mere force of habit. Its broad deserted streets and decaying palaces lie silent and sad in the drowsy noon sunshine, like the aisles of a September forest. But in the days of Tasso it was one of the gayest cities of Italy, which looked upon itself as the centre of the world, and all beyond as mere margin. It was always _festa_, always carnival, in Ferrara; and when the poet came to it in his twentieth year, on the last day of October 1565, he found it one brilliant theatre. The reigning duke, Alphonso II., had just been married to the daughter of Ferdinand I., Emperor of Austria; and this splendid alliance was celebrated by tournaments, balls, feasts, and other pageantry, which transcended everything of the kind that had previously been seen in Italy, with the exception, perhaps, of the fetes connected with the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to his grandfather. The ardent mind of the poet, it need hardly be said, was completely fascinated. He saw himself surrounded daily with all the splendours of chivalry, and lived in the midst of scenes such as haunt the dreams of poets and inspire the pages of romance. Goethe, in his _Torquato Tasso_, an exquisite poem, it may be said, but wanting in dramatic action, gives a vivid picture of the poet's life at the court of Ferrara, which bore some resemblance to his own at the court of Weimar.