But fate had now discharged its last evil arrow, and began to relent during the two remaining years of his life.  The sun that was all day obscured, as it struggled with dark clouds, emerged at last, and made the western sky ablaze with splendour.  All over the country nothing was to be heard but the echoes of Tasso’s praises.  From the fountains of the Adige to the Straits of Messina, in the valleys of Savoy, and in the capitals of Spain and France, his immortal epic was read or recited by the highest and the lowest.  Fortunes were made by its sale.  The famous bandit Sciarra, who with his troop of robbers had terrified the whole of Southern Italy, hearing that Tasso was at Gaeta, on his journey from Naples to Rome, sent to compliment him, and offer him, not only a free passage, but protection by the way.  At Florence, whither he went at the invitation of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the whole literary society of the place, even including many of the Della Cruscans, showered honours upon him.  While at Rome Pope Clement VIII. gave him the most flattering reception, assigned to him an apartment in the Vatican, and an annual income of two hundred scudi.  From the representatives of his mother’s friends at Naples he was also offered an annuity of two hundred ducats, and a considerable sum in hand, on condition of stopping the lawsuit.  Thus furnished with what he had vainly looked for all his life, the means of a comfortable subsistence, his closing days promised a happiness to which he had hitherto been a stranger.  But the gifts of fortune were brought to him with sad auguries, like the soft sunny smiles of September skies, which gild the fading leaves with a mockery of May.  Tasso came to Rome in November.  But the state of his health was so deplorable that he could not remain with safety in the room assigned to him in the Vatican.  It was thought, therefore, that the elevated position and salubrious air, as well as the quiet life of the monastery of St. Onofrio, not far off on the same side of the Tiber, would be more suitable for his restoration.  Accordingly, Cardinal Cynthio Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement VIII., who had befriended him on many occasions, brought him to St. Onofrio in his own carriage.  And as his weary steps crossed the threshold, he said to the monks, who received him with pitying looks, “I come to die among you.”

Whenever he was able to go out, he spent the last days of his life in the garden of the monastery.  There he sat under the shadow of the aged oak that has since become historical; and as he watched the sunset of his life, he would gaze upon the mighty ruins and the glorious view stretching before him with that inspired vision which creates half the beauty it beholds, and with that enhanced appreciation caused by the prospect of the coming darkness which would hide it for ever from his sight.  We love to think of the poet in this quiet resting-place, where the noises of the great world reached him only in subdued