Leonora, the third and younger sister, remained unmarried. Being highly attractive in person, in manner, and in mind, it is no wonder if Torquato, having many opportunities of ingratiating himself in her favour, should be gradually betrayed, under the guise of that romantic strain of adulation to rank and beauty (especially in verse) which the fashion of the times not only tolerated but sanctioned, to insinuate all the fervour of a passion which, though hardly aware of it himself, and altogether unacknowledged by its sensitive object, might yet be harboured in the bosoms of both, though so secretly, that each more complacently and jealously watched the symptoms of a tender attachment in the other, than cared to examine the reality of the same in themselves. The mystery, thus cherished, for the tantalising delight of a hope too remote to be fulfilled, except at the sacrifice of every thing but that love, for which, if true, nothing might be deemed too much to be sacrificed, has never been cleared up, and all reasoning and conjecture on the subject, at this distance of time, must be vain. It has been with equal confidence both affirmed and denied, that the poet imprudently aspired to the hand of the princess, and that the princess as imprudently surrendered her heart to the poet, though, from necessity, she withheld her hand. From the numberless _canzoni_ and _sonetti_, of which love is the theme, among the _rime_ of Tasso, no premises towards the solution of this problem can be drawn. Dante and Petrarch, in all their effusions of the kind, are constant each to his respective mistress. Beatrice and Laura are the perpetual idols of their amorous devotion; but to so many--or, if to one, under so many different names and characters,--are Tasso's adorations addressed, that he may have had fifty fits of passion for as many flames, and been as true in turn to each and equally volatile to all. It is, however, a remarkable circumstance, that three of the greatest poets of Italy should owe as much of their posthumous renown to their questionable love as to their acknowledged genius, having been avowedly attached to ladies whose very existence is unascertained at this day, though volumes have been written, proving nothing more than (to borrow the comprehensive judgment of sir Roger de Coverley) that "much may be said on both sides."