Such were the events of Bernardo Tasso’s life.  I have dwelt upon them in detail, since they foreshadow and illustrate the miseries of his more famous son.  In character and physical qualities Torquato inherited no little from his father.  Bernardo was handsome, well-grown, conscious of his double dignity as a nobleman and poet.  From the rules of honor, as he understood them, he deviated in no important point of conduct.  Yet the life of courts made him an incorrigible dangler after princely favors.  The Amadigi, upon which he set such store, was first planned and dedicated to Charles V., then altered to suit Henri II. of France, and finally adapted to the flattery of Philip II., according as its author’s interests with the Prince of Salerno and the Duke of Urbino varied.  No substantial reward accrued to him, however, from its publication.  His compliments wasted their sweetness on the dull ears of the despot of Madrid.  In misfortune Bernardo sank to neither crime nor baseness, even when he had no clothes to put upon his back.  Yet he took the world to witness of his woes, as though his person ought to have been sacred from calamities of common manhood.  A similar dependent spirit was manifested in his action as a man of letters.  Before publishing the Amadigi he submitted it to private criticism, with the inevitable result of obtaining feigned praises and malevolent strictures.  Irresolution lay at the root of his treatment of Torquato.  While groaning under the collar of courtly servitude, he determined that the youth should study law.  While reckoning how little his own literary fame had helped him, he resolved that his son should adopt a lucrative profession.  Yet no sooner had Torquato composed his Rinaldo, than the fond parent had it printed, and immediately procured a place for him in the train of the Cardinal Luigi d’Este.  It is singular that the young man, witnessing the wretchedness of his father’s life, should not have shunned a like career of gilded misery and famous indigence.  But Torquato was born to reproduce Bernardo’s qualities in their feebleness and respectability, to outshine him in genius, and to outstrip him in the celebrity of his misfortunes.

In the absence of his father little Torquato grew up with his mother and sister at Sorrento under the care of a good man, Giovanni Angeluzzo who gave him the first rudiments of education.  He was a precocious infant, grave in manners, quick at learning, free from the ordinary naughtinesses of childhood.  Manso reports that he began to speak at six months, and that from the first he formed syllables with precision.  His mother Porzia appears to have been a woman of much grace and sweetness, but timid and incapable of fighting the hard battle of the world.  A certain shade of melancholy fell across the boy’s path even in these earliest years, for Porzia, as we have seen, met with cruel treatment from her relatives, and her only support, Bernardo, was far away in exile.