They had been a very affectionate and faithful coupíe, and Bernardo's grief was of course aggravated by his having been absent from Porzia in her last moments. In his sorrow and loneliness he resolved to send for Torquato to rejoin him. It must be explained that Bernardo Tasso, after his patron's final ruin, had returned from France to Italy, and taken refuge at the court of Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who had invited him and received him very honourably. So, after some four years passed in the Eternal City, which years were chiefly spent in assiduous study, Torquato took leave of his kind preceptor, Maurizio Cattaneo, and departed for Mantua. Among the most indelible impressions left on our poet by his stay in Rome appears to have been that of a certain courtly and almost chivalrous tone of manners which is said to have distinguished Maurizio Cattaneo. The latter seems, too, to have concerned himself with the physical, as well as moral and mental, education of his pupil. Torquato was an adept in most of the knightly exercises of the day. When he rejoined his father at Mantua, he was tall for his years, handsome, and strong; and a prodigy of education according to the standard of the times, having fully completed a course of the Greek and Latin Languages, rhetoric, poetry, and logic. His father was, very naturally, filled with joy and pride at the boy's attainments, and although he had sent for him with the intention of keeping him as a companion in his widowed life, yet he shortly sent him to the University of Padua, there to pursue the study of the law, in company with Scipio Gonzaga (afterwards Cardinal), a kinsman of the reigning Duke of Mantua, and within a year or two of Torquato's own age. The two lads fell into a great friendship, lived during their student days in the closest intimacy, and preserved their mutual attachment through life. There, in the stately and learned city, Tasso passed five years of his existence, still so brief, but already chequered with many vicissitudes. Stately, sleepy old Padua, as it is now!with its great silent spaces which the sunshine reigns over victoriously; its narrower streets full of welcome shade in the spring and summer and autumn days; its wide picturesque piazza all ablaze on marketdays with fruits and flowers, amongst which the vivid yellow flowers of the pumpkin burn like flames; its glimpses of red oleander blossoms and polished dark green foliage peeping over garden walls; its wide, silent, dreamy churches, and its haunting memories of a splendid past! Padua was still splendid in the middle of the sixteenth century, when Torquato Tasso, and Scipio Gonzaga, and many another youth illustrious by birth or genius, paced its academic halls. Here Torquato, not yet turned seventeen, passed a public examination in canon and civil law, philosophy, and theology, "with universal eulogy and astonishment of that learned university," as a contemporary writer quaintly declares. But in the following year, when Torquato was but eighteen, the eulogy and astonishment were still further intensificd by the publi cation of the heroic poem called "Rinaldo.” It was, indeed, a marvellous production for a youth of his age, and in the words of his friend and biographer Manso, a brilliant dawn which presaged the rising of that full sun of genius to be displayed later in the epic of "Jerusalem Delivered." The poem was dedicated to the Cardinal Luigi d'Este, brother of the reigning Duke Alfonso II., and published under the auspices of his Eminence. This was the first link in the chain which bound Tasso to the princely house of Este, to their glory and his sorrow as it proved. Bernardo, although naturally proud of his son's genius, seems to have looked with some discontent upon the lad's devotion to poetry. He himself was a poet, and the Muse had not bettered his fortunes; and he had thought to give young Torquato a career which opened up a prospect of worldly success, riches, and a solid positionnamely, the profession of the law. But let the good Bernardo roughhew his ends as carefully as he might, the divinity called poetry shaped them far otherwise than he intended. It is an old story. Boccaccio and Petrarch furnished examples of the imperious and irrresistible force of inborn genius to break through any bonds of calculating prudence. And long before their time the Roman Ovid sang, undergoing the same struggle against parental authority: Nec me verbosas leges ediscere, nec me Ingrato vocem prostituisse foro, Mortale est quod quæris opus; mihi fama perennis Tasso, like Ovid, chose "undying fame" rather than the weary but profitable labour of studying "verbose laws." The one languished in a horrible exile, the other was imprisoned as a maniac. Rarely does the implacable divinity confer her sovereign favours save in exchange for the very life-blood of her votaries; but perhaps even among the tragic annals of poets there is no record more steeped in sadness than that of the life of Torquato Tasso. As yet, however, he is surrounded by the rosy light of the lucente aurora; youth and hope animate his breast, praise is meted to him in no stinted measure, friendship holds his hand in a firm, cordial grasp, and the clouds that are to darken the meridian and the evening of his days cast no shade upon the brightness of the morning. So great was the reputation of the "Rinaldo" that the University of Bologna invited the youthful poet to visit that city, conveying the flattering request through Pier Donato Cesi, then vice-legate, and afterwards legate at Bologna, and Cardinal. Torquato went to Bologna and there pursued his studies, and even read and disputed publicly in the schools on various subjects, and especially on poetry. He is said to have been recalled thence at the instance of Scipio Gonzaga, at that time head of the Academy of the "Etherials" of Padua-one of the numberless institutions of the kind which sprang up in Italy in the sixteenth century. Scipio is said to have been jealous of Bologna's having possession of the rising genius instead of Padua; and moreover to have desired Tasso's return to the latter place from motives of personal attachment to him Certain it is that Tasso did return to Padua, where he was received with great honour by the "Etherials," amongst whom he assumed the name of "Pentito," or "the repenting one. This singular choice of an appellation is explained by Manso to mean that Tasso repented the time he had spent in the study of law. But Tiraboschi reveals a bit of secret history which Manso either did not know or chose to suppress, and which shows that vexations and mortifications were not spared to the young poet even in these early days of his fame. Tiraboschi possessed a long letter written by Tasso to the vice-legate Cesi, above-mentioned, from which it appears that the poet during his stay in Bologna was accused of being the author of certain libellous verses, and that his dwelling was consequently searched by the birri (officers of the law, in such evil repute that their title is a term of reproach in Italy to this day), and his books and papers carried off, and that this was the true cause of his quitting Bologna. Tasso indignantly defends himself against the charge, and complains with much spirit to the legate of the injurious treatment he suffered. "Why," says he among other things, were the birri sent to my rooms on a slight and unreasonable suspicion, my companions insulted, my books taken away? Why were so many spies set to work to find out where I went? Why have so many honourable gentlemen been examined in such a strange fashion?" He demands moreover, to be allowed to come to Bologna, and justify himself before some wise and impartial judge, "which, however," says Tiraboschi quietly, "does not appear to have been granted to him." The letter bears date the last day of February 1564, and was written from Castelvetro, at that time a feudal tenure of the Counts Rangoni within the territory of Modena. "" Tasso was thus within a few days of having completed his twentieth year when he left Bologna. During his second sojourn in Padua he appears to have sketched out the first plan of his great epic, the "Jerusalem Delivered," which he intended from the first to dedicate to Duke Alfonso d'Este, sovereign of Ferrara. In the year 1565 he was formally invited by the duke to take up his abode at the court of the latter. Chambers were provided for him in the ducal palace, "and all his wants so considered, as that he should be able at his leisure, and free from care, to serve the Muse both by contemplation and composition: the which, in truth, he did, by proceeding with the poem of the "Jerusalem Delivered," and writing those earlier rhymes and dialogues in prose which were the first to be beheld with eagerness and astonishment by the world." (Manso: "Life of Torquato Tasso.") If ever ghosts walked in the sunlight, I think they would choose the long, sunny, grass-grown silent, slowly crumbling streets of Ferrara for such wanderings. The changes there for the last three centuries or so have been brought about, not so much by the advent of new things, as by the fading and decay of the old. Like an antique arras sorely preyed upon by moth and dust, Ferrara yet preserves a faint and colourless image of the olden time; and her aspect appeals to the fancy with all that pathos which belongs to things once stately and noble, now rotting in oblivion and decay. As Browning, in his poem entitled “A Toccata of Galuppi," speaks of the fair Venetian dames who used to' listen to that quaint music, toying with a velvet mask or drinking in soft sounds of courtship covered by the tinkle of the harpsichord, and exclaims, with the sensitiveness of a poet What's become of all the gold I feel chilly and grown old! so one may feel chilly in the sunny streets of Ferrara, thinking of all those brave figures, shining with beauty, valour, splendour, and genius, which used to pace them, and have marched across the illuminated disc of this life into the fathomless shadow of the dread beyond. Duke Hercules, the immediate predecessor of Tasso's patron, Alfonso II., had beautified and extended his city very greatly. În his time and under his auspices a whole new quarter sprang up, enclosed by an extended circuit of walls fortified according to the military science of that day. He caused a number of new streets to be planned, and compelled the monks of various religious houses, such, for example, as the Monastery of St. Catherine, of the Angels, and of the Carthusians, to sell or let on lease their lands which bordered on the new streets, in order to have stately mansions constructed on them. In this way, in the Via degli Angeli alone there arose four or five truly magnificent palaces, besides other handsome edifices; and of these palaces the visitor to Ferrara will probably remember most vividly the Palazzo de Diamanti, so called because the whole of its facade is covered with massive stonework, each block of which is cut in facets, like the surface of a precious stone. This splendid building existed, then, in Tasso's time; but when he first saw it, it was not yet completed. It belonged to the Cardinal Luigi d'Este, to whom it had been bequeathed by Duke Hercules, together with a sum of money to finish it. And the Cardinal finished it accordingly in 1567-that is to say, two years after Tasso first went to reside at the court of Ferrara. The city was then a brilliant scene, the resort of the most famous, talented and illustrious Italians of the day. Beauty, rank and genius figured on that stage. The first parts, the leading personages in the drama, were admirably filled; even tragic elements were not wanting to complete the interest and prevent any chance of a monotony of cheerfulness! A great poet suffering from hopeless love and forcibly imprisoned amongst maniacs, for instance, must have been a thrilling incident. As to the choral masses in the background, the crowd which figured in dumb show, the populace, in short, they suffered a good deal from pestilence and famine in those days; both which scourges fell, of course, more heavily on the poor than on the rich. But still it appears that Alfonso II. did his best for them according to his conceptions of his duty. The population of the city, according to a census taken in 1592 by command of Pope Clement VIII. soon after the death of Duke Alfonso, amounted to 41,710 souls, exclusive of ecclesiastics, foreigners, and Jews; including those categories, it reached to over 50,000. The number of inhabitants in Ferrara in the present year is but 30,000 ! In the year 1570 (according to Tiraboschi and Rosini, 1572 according to Manso) Tasso accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d'Este on an embassy with which the latter was charged by Pope Gregory XIII. to the court of Charles IX. of France. There the poet was loaded with flattery and honours, the king himself particularly delighting to distinguish him for the reason, as it is alleged by contemporary biographers, that Tasso had paid such a splendid tribute to the valour of the French nation in his great poem of " Geoffrǝdo." Thus it would seem that the "Jerusalem Delivered" was originally destined to bear the name of Godfrey de Bouillon, and also that it was far enough advanced at the period of Tasso's visit to France to allow of a portion of it having become known to the world, at least to the little world of courtiers who surrounded the poet. But Tasso did not remain very long in France. Within a twelvemonth he returned to Ferrara, drawn thither by an irresistible attraction -his unhappy and misplaced passion for the Duchess Eleonora d'Este. It appears clearly from the poet's own words that he became fantastically enamoured of the princess's portrait before he had seen her; for on his first arrival in Ferrara, during the festivities on the occasion of the marriage of Duke Alfonso with Barbara of Austria, Eleonora was too indisposed to leave her room. But very soon his love ceased to be merely a fantastic dream, and became only too serious and fervent. On her part the princess was touched and flattered by the adoration of the greatest poet of his day, who was at the same time a very accomplished cavalier. She seems to have had an insatiable appetite for his homage, his praises, conveyed in immortal verse, and his respectful worship of her at a distance. But the best testimony of the most illustrious Italian commentators seems to exclude the idea that the princess so derogated from her rank as to return Tasso's love like a woman of a less illustrious breed, or as he very certainly desired that she should return it. Scandals of a much graver kind than a love intrigue between an unmarried princess and a poet were rife enough in that time and place to make such a suspicion neither strange nor improbable. But various circumstances minutely searched for, sifted, and collated, concur to show that there is no ground for darkening Eleonora's maiden fame. But she cannot, I fear, be acquitted on a different count, that, namely, of a cold, hard, and unwomanly indifference to the terrible misfortunes which fell upon Torquato Tasso for love of her. During his long and horrible imprisonment in the hospital of St. Anna, she vouchsafed no reply to his heartrending appeals to her for mercy; nor, so far as is known, did she make one effort to intercede with the duke her brother for his release. It is true, however, and may be pleaded as an extenu |