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 keen interest in the things ennobled by history and cared for by grown-up men.  This dawn of a higher consciousness found a congenial sphere in the city of the soul.  With what absorbing eagerness his young mind would be drawn to the study of the immortal deeds, which were the inheritance of his race, on the very spot where they were done.  He would behold with his eyes the glorious things of which he had heard.  There would be much that would shock and disappoint him when he came to be familiar with it.  Many of the ancient monuments had been destroyed; and many of the ancient sites, especially the Forum and the Palatine, were deserted wastes which had not yet yielded up their buried treasures of art to the pick and spade of the antiquarian.  The ravages inflicted