, Porzia de' Rossi,
was Tuscan by birth, her family haling from Pistoja at the foot of the
Apennines, but owning property near Naples; whilst the poet himself was
destined to spend his years of childhood at Sorrento and at Naples, his
youth at Rome and Verona, his brilliant period of fame and prosperity at
Ferrara and the Lombard courts, and again some of his closing years of
disgrace and disappointment amidst the familiar scenes of his infancy. Of
good ancient stock the Tassi owed their acquisition of wealth to the
re-establishment of the system of posting throughout Northern Italy in the
thirteenth century, when the immediate progenitor of the poet, one Omodeo
de' Tassi, was nominated comptroller, and it is curious to note that owing
to this circumstance the arms of the family containing the posthorn and
the badger's skin--_Tasso_ is the Italian for badger--continued to be borne
for many centuries upon the harness of all Lombard coach-horses.
Torquato's father, Bernardo Tasso, himself a poet of no mean calibre and
the composer of a scholarly but somewhat prolix work, the _Amadigi_,
formed for many years a prominent member of that brilliant band of
literary courtiers within the castle of Vittoria Colonna, the Lady of
Ischia, of whom we shall speak more fully in another place. But for the
overwhelming and all-eclipsing fame of his distinguished son, Bernardo
might have been able to claim a high place in the list of Italian writers
of the Renaissance; as it was, the father's undoubted talents were quickly
forgotten in the blaze of his own beloved "Tassino's" popularity, so that
he is now chiefly remembered as the sire of a poetic genius, as one of the
great Vittoria's favourite satellites and as the author of an oft-quoted
sonnet to his intellectual mistress. Bernardo Tasso did not marry until
the somewhat mature age of forty-seven, when, as we have already said, he
espoused the daughter of the Tuscan house of Rossi, by whom he had two
children; a daughter, Cornelia, and the immortal Torquato, who was born in
1544, three years before the death of the divine poetess of Ischia.

But Bernardo was not merely a bard and a courtier, for he was also,
unfortunately for himself and his ill-fated family, a keen politician in
an age when politics offered anything but a safe pursuit, and as his views
invariably coincided with those of his chief friend and patron, the head
of the powerful Sanseverino family, Tasso the Elder found himse