Torquato for a little time was pleasantly situated at Bergamo, in the family of his cousin and fellow-student, where, being a boy of exceedingly prepossessing appearance, amiable disposition, and manifestly brilliant talents, he was much noticed and even caressed by many of the principal persons in the neighbourhood. Bernardo, however, anxious to have him under his own eye and direction, soon reclaimed him. At Pesaro, Torquato, as might be expected, won attention from the whole circle of his father's acquaintance; and the duke d'Urbino himself was so delighted with his graceful modesty and rare accomplishments, that he introduced him to his own son as a suitable companion in his studies and his pleasures. The young noble of fortune at once became attached to the young noble of genius, and a friendship, so natural to kindred minds early associated—the dawn of affection preceding the day-star of passion in the order of Providence—speedily sprang up, and amidst all the splendour of station which through life distinguished the one, and the sufferings by adversity which were the subsequent lot of the other, was never forsworn or forgotten by either. And well was the lustre, so transiently shed by the prince, in the court of his father, upon the humble son of the exile there, imperishably reflected upon himself, in after years, even from the dungeons of Ferrara, by the glory of the author of "Gerusalemme Liberata."
Bernardo having at length put the finishing stroke to his Amadigi, looked to the munificence of the king of France and the prince of Salerno for the means of printing it. In these reliances he was disappointed; and it appears that his patron, the prince, was himself so impoverished, that the pension to the poet of 300 crowns (a poor compensation for all his services and sacrifices) was about this time withdrawn. So utterly perished were Bernardo's resources, in this extremity, that, according to his own lamentable statement, had it not been for the bounty of the duke d'Urbino, he must have been almost reduced to the necessity of begging bread for himself and his son. The duke liberally supplied him, not with bread only for himself and his son, but presented him with 300 ducats, to which were added a hundred gold crowns by the cardinal de Tournon. Hereupon he repaired to Venice, to publish his work. Being received with great respect by the literary characters of that city, then eminent for noble arts as well as victorious arms and prosperous commerce, he was adopted by them, and made secretary to their academy. To this office was annexed a salary so considerable, that, with his wonted improvidence, he immediately established himself in a handsome house, sumptuously furnished, and adorned with what seems to have been his delight, rich tapestry, the poetry of the needle and the shuttle, and which at best is but to painting what painting itself sometimes is to nature — a copy reminding the spectator of an original, of which one of the greatest merits of the imitation is the difficulty overcome in achieving it.
Bernardo's vicissitudes would present a touching but melancholy contrast to those of Gil Blas of Santillane, if written in a style of seriousness and sympathy with what is most sacred in suffering, and trying in hope deferred, equal to the pungent humour and heartless indifference to what is "virtuosest, discreetest, best," in the characteristic adventures of that gay footman of fortune. But such transitions as both Bernardo and Torquato experienced, strange as they seem to us, were events of common occurrence, arising out of the state of society in the petty principalities and commonwealths of Italy in the middle ages, and long after the revival of learning, when those who followed the profession of letters were too often dependent for the means of subsistence upon the precarious patronage of haughty nobles and ostentatious ecclesiastics. The part which Torquato had to bear in the diversities of circumstance, scene, and company, into which he was thrown with his parent, was too well calculated to cherish and confirm all his natural aspirings; while those patrician sentiments, which had been instilled into him from his cradle, amidst poverty, ignominy, and all the wretchedness of ephemeral favour, ever sustained in him a lofty self-esteem, on the ground of honourable birth, the consciousness of innate genius, and the pride of acquired learning, to which had been carefully added those gentlemanly accomplishments which rendered him a fit companion for people of the highest rank in an age of extraordinary display of personal conduct and ceremonial bearing. Tasso, in addition to his peculiar advantages, excelled in all these conventional ones, except in self-control—that especially which degenerates into servility—for (though the most exquisite flatterer in the world, as thousands of panegyrical verses prove him to have been) he never learned the meaner, but more profitable, art of being a court-minion.
While he was thus pursuing his studies with in defatigable application, he was not less diligent in cultivating those talents, which had given such extraordinary signs of power within him. It is stated that while, for the latter purpose, he was reading with intense devotion the poets both of old Italy and new, as well as the relics of the nobler bards of ancient Greece, like most of his countrymen, (perhaps, from secret nationality of feeling,) he preferred the Latins to these, and among the Latins Virgil beyond every other bore the palm in his youthful imagination. In fact he grew so enamoured of the graces and excellences of the Æneid, that his own epic became just such a work as, it might be presumed, Virgil himself would have composed in the same age, and under the same influences, as Tasso lived; while, on the other hand, had their births been exchanged, Tasso might have been the glory of the court of Augustus, and flourished then in splendour amidst the greatest and most intellectual society of men of talents that were ever contemporary, instead of being an almoner, an exile, a prisoner, beholden for food and raiment, in his best estate, to the bounty—or rather to the parsimony—of "the Great Vulgar" of Italy in the sixteenth century, whose names are more illustrious from having been connected with his, than for any record of themselves or their ancestors, which could render their families illustrious beyond the little boundaries of their domains. This supposition, in reference to Virgil and Tasso, may be deemed impertinent; hazardous it certainly is, and once would have been deemed heretical by the idolaters of the Roman poet. Though this is not precisely the place, yet, in a discursive memoir like the present, it may be allowable, to remark upon a line of Boileau, which has done more injury to the reputation of Tasso than all the splenetic criticisms of Sperone, and the verbal persecutions of the Della Cruscans. Ridiculing the bad taste of certain personages who haunt courts, and from their rank and assurance are permitted to judge as foolishly as they please of the merits of authors with impunity, he says (and in a note gives a special instance of such aristocratic wrong-headness[38]) that these will prefer "à Malherbe, Théophile," "Théophile to Malherbe,"—
"Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile:"
"And Tasso's tinsel to all Virgil's gold."
This flippant antithesis, which, from its sparkling ambiguity, might itself be quoted as a specimen of sheer "tinsel" (clinquant), amounts to no more than that there are "fools," as the satirist calls them, who prefer what is false in Tasso to what is true in Virgil; but that the whole, the half, or even a tenth of the "Gerusalemme Liberata," of which he himself speaks elsewhere with sufficient commendation, is composed of "clinquant," without a greatly overbalancing weight of gold even in its worst parts, he has not dared to affirm, though by a pitiful insinuation, not less unworthy of the author than unjust to the object, he has had the left-handed luck to fix a stigma to that effect upon the fair fame of one, in comparison with whose magnificent creations of thought his own finely elaborated productions are but as "French wire" to "solid bullion." The feeble confirmation of Boileau's equivocal sentence, by the elegant but prejudiced Addison, is of little weight. The critic, who, in tracing Milton's obligations to some of his great forerunners, acknowledges that among these he might have included Tasso, but that he does not deem him "a sufficient voucher," could be but very imperfectly acquainted with the authority which he affected to disparage, but which the poet of "Paradise Lost" held in very different estimation. Try Boileau, when he attempts a strain of heroics, as in the "Ode on the taking of Namur," or Addison, in his celebrated "Campaign," by any page that may be first opened in all Tasso's multifarious compositions in verse, and the "white plume" on the crest of Louis XIV., which the court poet mistook for a star, and the destroying "angel," which the court critics of queen Anne's reign hailed as descending from "the highest heaven of invention," and the feather metamorphosis, in the first instance, will be pronounced a puerile and pedantic conceit; and the "angel," in the second, a piece of commonplace machinery, which scarcely escapes the charge of profaneness in its main attribute. Marlborough, a mortal man, burning to avenge his country's wrongs, may well be imagined as slaughtering, with terrible delight, the thousands and tens of thousands of her enemies; but that an angel should be "pleased" (as the cold and heartless phrase is) in executing judgments upon unresisting victims of divine wrath (righteous as the vengeance may be) is utterly inconceivable; nor can the poet shelter himself under the doubtful interpretation of the context,—
"Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm,"—
because the first, last, and only impression upon the reader's mind will be, that the destroyer is "pleased" with the destruction, though the Almighty himself declares that "He hath no pleasure in the death of the wicked." Both these passages might have escaped carping criticism; but, when Boileau and Addison mislead the public to believe that Tasso's writings are "all tinsel," it is fair to show that their own are not "all gold."[39]
Torquato's mind now feeling strength, and gaining confidence to undertake things beyond his years, he diligently gave his days and nights, in the intervals of severer exercises, to reading and meditating upon the works of his great Italian predecessors, that he might form, after their models, a style of verse and manner of composition which should rival theirs, and yet be all his own. Unconsciously, it is probable, at first, but gradually as he grew up, through an undefined period, he conceived, and, before he reached the age of eighteen, had executed, what Dr. Black calls "the most wonderful work that ever was written by man," when the youth of the author, and the short time in which it was composed—ten months, it is reported—are taken into the account. The "Joan of Arc," by our illustrious countryman, Southey, produced in a less compass of time, and at an age not much more advanced than Tasso's, may fairly be put in competition with the "Rinaldo," without disparagement to either. Nothing connected with the existence of man, in this mysterious world, at once living within and beyond himself, exceeds, either in purity or intensity, the delight of youth when framing poetry at first according to the extent of new-formed powers, and anticipating poetry to come, when years shall have matured his faculties, and his wings, after their first moulting, shall have acquired full vigour of plume to bear him "with no middle flight" above the Aonian mounts while he pursues