a wonderful knowledge of Latin and
Greek, and manifesting such enthusiasm in his studies that he rose
long before day-break, and was so impatient to get to school that his
mother was often obliged to send him away in the dark with a lantern.
Here he showed the first symptoms of his genius for poetry and
rhetoric, and gave public testimony to the deep religious feeling
which he inherited from his parents, and which had been so carefully
cultivated by his ecclesiastical masters, by joining the communion of
the Church. In his tenth year his father left the court of Henry III.
of France, and settled in Rome, where he had apartments assigned him
in the immense palace of Cardinal Hippolito of the house of Ferrara.
These apartments were furnished as handsomely as his impoverished
resources allowed, in the hope that he might have his wife and
children to live with him. But in spite of all his efforts and
entreaties his wife was not allowed by her brothers to rejoin him;
while his own position as an outlaw made it impossible for him to
enter the kingdom of Naples to rescue her. The only concession he
could get from the authorities was permission for her to enter with
her daughter Cornelia as pensioners among the nuns in the convent of
San Festo; and no sooner was this step taken than her friends openly
seized her dowry, on the plea that it would otherwise belong to the
convent, as her husband's outlawry cancelled his claims to it. Her
boy, of course, could not enter the convent with her; he was therefore
sent to his father in Rome. The separation between mother and son, we
are told, was most affecting. To her it was the climax of her trials;
and, bowed down beneath the weight of her accumulated sufferings, she
fell an easy victim to an attack of fever, which, in the short space
of twenty-four hours, ended her wretched life. Upon Tasso the parting
from a mother whom he was never to see again, and whose personal
qualities and grievous trials had greatly endeared her to him,
produced an impression which even the great troubles of his after life
could never efface.

With a mind richly stored, notwithstanding his youthful age, with
classic lore, and quickened and made sensitive by a varied and
sorrowful career, Torquato Tasso came to Rome. The first occasion of
seeing the imperial city must have been exciting and awakening in a
high degree to such a boy. He was leaving behind the passive
simplicity of the child, and had already a k