His own mind became a constant cause of self-torture.
Suspicious of others, he grew to be suspicious of himself.

And when he left S.Anna, these disorders, instead of abating, continued to afflict him, so that his most enthusiastic admirers were forced to admit that 'he was subject to constitutional melancholy with crises of delirium, but not to actual insanity.'[52] At first, his infirmity did not interfere with intellectual production of a high order, though none of his poetry, after the _Gerusalemme_ was completed in 1574, rose to the level of his earlier work.

But in course of time the artist's faculty itself was injured, and the creations of his later life are unworthy of his genius.
[Footnote 51: A letter written by Guarini, the old friend, rival and constant Court-companion of Tasso at Ferrara, upon the news of his death in 1595, shows how a man of cold intellect judged his case.

'The death by which Tasso has now paid his debt to nature, seems to me like the termination of that death of his in this world which only bore the outer semblance of life.' See Casella's _Pastor Fido_, p.xxxii.Guarini means that when Tasso's mind gave way, he had really died in his own higher self, and that his actual death was a release.] [Footnote 52: Tasso's own letters after the beginning of 1579, and Manso's Life (_op.

cit._ pp.