during the three years of residence which is required for a law degree.  But all the time his mind was occupied with other thoughts than those connected with his law studies.  Still, uncongenial as they must have been to him, he could not have attended for three years to such studies without unconsciously deriving much benefit from them.  They must have impressed upon him those ideas of order and logical arrangement which he afterwards carried out in his writings, and which separate them so markedly from the confused, inconsistent license of the older literature of Italy; and he could not have resided in the birthplace of Livy, in constant association with the highest minds of the time, as a member of a University then the most famous in Europe, numbering no less than ten thousand students from all parts of the world, without his intellectual life being greatly quickened.

During ten months of enthusiastic work he produced his first great poem, which, considering his age—­for he was then only in his eighteenth year—­and the short time occupied in its composition, is one of the most remarkable efforts of genius.  He called his poem Rinaldo, after the name of the knight whose romantic adventures it celebrates—­not the Rinaldo of the Gerusalemme Liberata, but the Paladin of whom so much is said in the poems of Boiardo and Ariosto,—­and dedicated it to Cardinal Lewis of Este, then one of the most distinguished patrons of literature in Italy.  It contains a beautiful allusion to his father’s genius as the source of his own inspiration.  It abounds in the supernatural incidents and personified abstractions characteristic of the romantic school of poetry; and though Galileo said of it that it reminded him of a picture formed of inlaid work, rather than of a painting in oil, it has nevertheless a unity of plot, a sustained interest, and a uniform elevation of style, which distinguishes it from all the poetry of the period.  Our own Spenser has imbibed the spirit of some of its most beautiful passages; and several striking coincidences between his Faerie Queen and the Rinaldo can be traced, particularly in the account of the lion tamed by Clarillo, and the well-known incident of Una and the lion in Spenser.  The poem of Rinaldo will always be read with interest, as it strikes the keynote of Tasso’s great epic, the Gerusalemme Liberata, many of the finest fictions of which were adopted with very little modification from the earlier work.  His letter asking his father’s permission to publish it came at a very inopportune moment.  Bernardo was smarting just then under the disappointments connected with the reception of his own poem, the Amadigi.  It produced little impression upon the general public; the copies which he distributed among the Italian nobles procured him nothing but conventional thanks and polite praise; while the magnificent edition which he prepared specially for presentation to Philip II.