eo." Rome once more, then Mantua, then Florence, then Rome, then Naples, then Rome, then Naples—such is the weary record of the years 1590–94. He endured a veritable Odyssey of malady, indigence and misfortune. To Tasso everything came amiss. He had the palaces of princes, cardinals, patriarchs, nay popes, always open to him. Yet he could rest in none. His health grew ever feebler and his genius dimmer. In 1592, he published a revised version of the Gerusalemme, Gerusalemme Conquistata. All that made the poem of his early manhood charming he rigidly erased. The versification became more pedantic; the romantic and magical episodes were excised; the heavier elements of the plot underwent a dull rhetorical development. During the same year a blank-verse retelling of Genesis, called Le Sette Giornate, saw the light. When mental disorder, physical weakness, and decay of inspiration seemed dooming Tasso to oblivion, his last years were cheered with hope. Pope Clement VIII ascended the papal chair in 1592. He and his nephew, Cardinal Aldobrandini of San Giorgio, determined to befriend the poet. In 1594, they invited him to Rome. There he was to receive the crown of laurels, as Petrarch had been crowned, on the Capitol. Worn out with illness, Tasso reached Rome in November. The ceremony of his coronation was deferred because Cardinal Aldobrandini had fallen ill, but the pope assigned him a pension; and, under the pressure of pontifical remonstrance, Prince Avellino, who held Tasso's maternal estate, agreed to discharge a portion of his claims by payment of a yearly rent. At no time since Tasso left St. Anna had the heavens apparently so smiled upon him. Capitolian honors and money were now at his disposal. Yet fortune came too late. Before he wore the crown of poet laureate, or received his pensions, he ascended to the convent of Sant'Onofrio, on a stormy 1 April 1595. Seeing a cardinal's coach toil up the steep Trasteverine Hill, the monks came to the door to greet it. From the carriage stepped Tasso and told the prior he had come to die with him. Tasso died in Sant'Onofrio in April 1595 aged 51. The last twenty years of his existence had been practically and artistically unsatisfying. Other works Rime (Rhymes), nearly two thousand lyrics in nine books, were written between 1567 and 1593, influenced by Petrarch's Canzoniere (Songbook). Galealto re di Norvegia (1573–4) is an unfinished tragedy,