, he had
three children, the eldest of whom was a daughter named Cornelia, and the
youngest the author of the _Jerusalem Delivered_. the other child died
young. The house distinguished by the poet's birth was restored from a
dilapidated condition by order of Joseph Bonaparte when King of Naples,
and is now an hotel.

Torquato Tasso was born March the 11th, 1544, nine years after the death
of Ariosto, who was intimate with his father. He was very devoutly
brought up; and grew so tall, and became so premature a scholar, that
at nine, he tells us, he might have been taken for a boy of twelve. At
eleven, in consequence of the misfortunes of his father, who had been
exiled with the Prince of Salerno, he was forced to part from his mother,
who remained at home to look after a dowry which she never received. Her
brothers deprived her of it; and in two years' time she died, Bernardo
thought by poison. Twenty-four years afterwards her illustrious son, in
the midst of his own misfortunes, remembered with sighs the tears with
which the kisses of his poor mother were bathed when she was forced to
let him go.[2]

The little Torquato following, as he says, like another Ascanius, the
footsteps of his wandering father, joined Bernardo in Rome. After two
years' study in that city, partly under an old priest who lived with
them, the vicissitudes of the father's lot took away the son first to
Bergamo, among his relations, and then to Pesaro, in the duchy of Urbino,
where his education was associated for nearly two years with that of the
young prince, afterwards Duke Francesco Maria the Second (della Rovere),
who retained a regard for him through life. In 1559 the boy joined his
father in Venice, where the latter had been appointed secretary to the
Academy; but next year he was withdrawn from these pleasing varieties
of scene by the parental delusion so common in the history of men of
letters--the study of the law; which Bernardo intended him to pursue
henceforth in the city of Padua. He accordingly arrived in Padua at the
age of sixteen and a half, and fulfilled his legal destiny by writing the
poem of _Rinaldo_, which was published in the course of less than two
years at Venice. The goodnatured and poetic father, convinced by this
specimen of jurisprudence how useless it was to thwart the hereditary
passion, permitted him to devote himself wholly to literature, which he
therefore went to study in the university of Bologna; and there, at