In 1552 she removed with her children to Naples, where Torquato was sent at once to the school which the Jesuits had opened there in the preceding year.  These astute instructors soon perceived that they had no ordinary boy to deal with.  They did their best to stimulate his mental faculties and to exalt his religious sentiments; so that he learned Greek and Latin before the age of ten, and was in the habit of communicating at the altar with transports of pious ecstasy in his ninth year.[5] The child recited speeches and poems in public, and received an elementary training in the arts of composition.  He was in fact the infant prodigy of those plausible Fathers, the prize specimen of their educational method.  As might have been expected, this forcing system overtaxed his nerves.  He rose daily before daybreak to attack his books, and when the nights were long he went to morning school attended by a servant carrying torches.

[Footnote 5:  ‘Sentendo in me non so qual nuova insolita contentezza,’ ‘non so qual segreta divozione.’ Lettere, vol. ii. p. 90.]

Without seeking to press unduly on these circumstances, we may fairly assume that Torquato’s character received a permanent impression from the fever of study and the premature pietism excited in him by the Jesuits in Naples.  His servile attitude toward speculative thought, that anxious dependence upon ecclesiastical authority, that scrupulous mistrust of his own mental faculties, that pretense of solving problems by accumulated citations instead of going to the root of the matter, whereby his philosophical writings are rendered nugatory, may with probability be traced to the mechanical and interested system of the Jesuits.  He was their pupil for three years, after which he joined his father in Rome.  There he seems to have passed at once into a healthier atmosphere.  Bernardo, though a sound Catholic, was no bigot; and he had the good sense to choose an able master for his son—­’a man of profound learning, possessed of both the ancient languages, whose method of teaching is the finest and most time-saving that has yet been tried; a gentleman withal, with nothing of the pedant in him.’[6] The boy was lucky also in the companion of his studies, a cousin, Cristoforo Tasso, who had come from Bergamo to profit by the tutor’s care.

[Footnote 6:  Bernardo’s Letter to Cav.  Giangiacopo Tasso, December 6, 1554.]

The young Tasso’s home cannot, however, have been a cheerful one.  The elderly hidalgo sitting up in bed to darn a single pair of hose, the absent mother pining for her husband and tormented by her savage brother’s avarice, environed the precocious child of ten with sad presentiments.  That melancholy temperament which he inherited from Bernardo was nourished by the half-concealed mysteriously-haunting troubles of his parents.  And when Porzia died suddenly, in 1556, we can hardly doubt that the father broke out before his son into some such expressions of ungovernable