Shakespeare’s Kent; and when the Prince of Salerno suspended payment of his salary he took leave of that master.  Some differences arising from the discomforts and irritations of both exiles had early intervened between them.  Tasso was miserably poor.  ’I have to stay in bed,’ he writes, ’to mend my hose; and if it were not for the old arras I brought with me from home, I should not know how to cover my nakedness.’[3] Besides this he suffered grievously in the separation from his wife, who was detained at Naples by her relatives—­’brothers who, instead of being brothers, are deadly foes, cruel wild beasts rather than men; a mother who is no mother but a fell enemy, a fury from hell rather than a woman.’[4] His wretchedness attained its climax when Porzia died suddenly on February 3, 1556.  Bernardo suspected that her family had poisoned her; and this may well have been.  His son Torquato, meanwhile had joined him in Rome; but Porzia’s brothers refused to surrender his daughter Cornelia, whom they married to a Sorrentine gentleman, Marzio Sersale, much to Bernardo’s disgust, for Sersale was apparently of inferior blood.  They also withheld Porzia’s dowry and the jointure settled on her by Bernardo—­property of considerable value which neither he nor Torquato were subsequently able to recover.

[Footnote 3:  Lett.  Ined. p. 100]

[Footnote 4:  Letter di Torquato Tasso, February 15, 1556, vol.  II. p. 157.]

In this desperate condition of affairs, without friends or credit, but conscious of his noble birth and true to honor, the unhappy poet bethought him of the Church.  If he could obtain a benefice, he would take orders.  But the King of France and Margaret of Valois, on whose patronage he relied, turned him a deaf ear; and when war broke out between Paul IV. and Spain, he felt it prudent to leave Rome.  It was at this epoch that Bernardo entered the service of Guidubaldo della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, with whom he remained until 1563, when he accepted the post of secretary from Guglielmo, Duke of Mantua.  He died in 1569 at Ostiglia, so poor that his son could scarcely collect money enough to bury him after selling his effects.  Manso says that a couple of door-curtains, embroidered with the arms of Tasso and De’Rossi, passed on this occasion into the wardrobe of the Gonzaghi.  Thus it seems that the needy nobleman had preserved a scrap of his heraldic trophies till the last, although he had to patch his one pain of breeches in bed at Rome.  It may be added, as characteristic of Bernardo’s misfortunes, that even the plain marble sarcophagus, inscribed with the words Ossa Bernardi Tassi which Duke Guglielmo erected to his memory in S. Egidio at Mantua, was removed in compliance with a papal edict ordering that monuments at a certain height above the ground should be destroyed to save the dignity of neighboring altars!