His poet's inspiration, his singer's spontaneity, came thus constantly into collision with his own deliberate utterances.

A perplexed self-scrutiny was the inevitable result, which pedagogues who were not inspired and could not sing, but who delighted in minute discussion, took good care to stimulate.

The worst, however, was that he had erected in his own mind a critical standard with which his genius was not in harmony.

The scholar and the poet disagreed in Tasso; and it must be reckoned one of the drawbacks of his age and education that the former preceded the latter in development.

Something of the same discord can be traced in contemporary painting, as will be shown when I come to consider the founders of the Bolognese Academy.
At the end of 1565 Tasso was withdrawn from literary studies and society in Padua.