Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 4.djvu/180

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146
THE LAMENT OF TASSO.

With needless torture, as their tyrant Will
Is wound up to the lust of doing ill:[1]
With these and with their victims am I classed,
'Mid sounds and sights like these long years have passed;
'Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close:
So let it be—for then I shall repose.


IV.

I have been patient, let me be so yet;
I had forgotten half I would forget,
But it revives—Oh! would it were my lot80
To be forgetful as I am forgot!—
Feel I not wroth with those who bade me dwell
In this vast Lazar-house of many woes?
Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind,
Nor words a language, nor ev'n men mankind;
Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows.
And each is tortured in his separate hell—
For we are crowded in our solitudes—
Many, but each divided by the wall,
Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods;90
While all can hear, none heed his neighbour's call—
None! save that One, the veriest wretch of all,
Who was not made to be the mate of these,
Nor bound between Distraction and Disease.
Feel I not wroth with those who placed me here?

Who have debased me in the minds of men,
  1. ["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.

    Tasso, in a letter to Angelo Grillo, dated June 16, 1584 (Letter 288, Le Lettere, etc., ii. 276). complains that Mosti did not interfere to prevent him being molested by the other inmates, disturbed in his studies, and treated disrespectfully by the governor's subordinates. In the letter to his sister Cornelia, from which Hobhouse quotes, the allusion is not to Mosti, but, according to Solerti, to the Cardinal Luigi d'Este. Elsewhere (Letter 133, Lettere, ii. 88, 89) Tasso describes Agostino Mosti as a rigorous and zealous Churchman, but far too cultivated and courteous a gentleman to have exercised any severity towards him pro-prio motu, or otherwise than in obedience to orders.]