erable to the highly romantic, deeply
religious spirit of the young poet; and his Jesuit preceptors, working on
the boy's imagination, were soon able to instil into his youthful brain
the notion of a new Crusade which would not only sweep the infidel ships
from off the Italian seas, but would also recapture the Holy City itself.
The Church, beginning at last to recover from the effects of Luther's
schism, was once more in a position to re-assert its ancient authority
over Catholic Christendom, and in Torquato Tasso it found an able
trumpeter to call together the scattered forces of the Faithful, and to
reunite them in a holy war. Astonished and delighted, all Italy was swept
by the golden torrent of Tasso's impassioned verses, that were intended to
urge the Catholic princes of Europe to the inauguration of a new Crusade.
Nor were the times unpropitious for such an event. Tunis, that hot-bed of
infidelity, piracy and iniquity, was in the hands of the Christians; and
the fleets of the Soldan had been well-nigh annihilated by Don John of
Austria at the glorious battle of Lepanto:--to convince a doubting and
hesitating world that the actual moment had come wherein to recover the
city of Jerusalem was the main object of the author of the _Gerusalemme
Liberata_. And it was his infancy spent upon this smiling but
pirate-harassed coast that was chiefly responsible for this desired end in
the epic of the Crusades; it was Tasso's early acquaintance with the Bay
of Naples, combined with his special training by the Jesuits, that forced
the poet's genius and ambition into this particular channel.

It is pleasant to think that Sorrento is still appreciative of its honour
as the birth-place of the great Italian poet. The citizens have erected a
statue of marble in one of their open spaces; they have called street,
hotel and _trattoria_ by his illustrious name; and can the modern spirit
of grateful acknowledgment go further than this? His father's house has
perished, it is true, through "Nature's changing force untrimmed," for the
greedy waves have undermined and swallowed up the tufa cliff which once
supported the old Tasso villa. But there is still standing in Strada di
San Nicola the old Sersale mansion, wherein the good Cornelia received her
long-lost brother in his peasant's guise, an unhappy exile from haughty
Ferrara. Of more interest however than the old town house of the Sersale
family is the ancient farm, known as the Vigna Ser