and friends.  In Rome he began to cherish a presentiment of his own genius.  A ‘vision splendid’ dawned upon his mind; and every step he made in knowledge and in mastery of language enforced the delightful conviction that ‘I too am a poet.’  Nothing in Tasso’s character was more tenacious than the consciousness of his vocation and the kind of self-support he gained from it.  Like the melancholy humor which degenerated into madness, this sense of his own intellectual dignity assumed extravagant proportions, passed over into vanity, and encouraged him to indulge fantastic dreams of greatness.  Yet it must be reckoned as a mitigation of his suffering; and what was solid in it at the period of which I now am writing, was the certainty of his rare gifts for art.

The Roman residence was broken by Bernardo’s journey to Urbino in quest of the appointment he expected from Duke Guidubaldo.  He sent Torquato with his cousin Cristoforo meanwhile to Bergamo, where the boy enjoyed a few months of sympathy and freedom.  This appears to have been the only period of his life in which Tasso experienced the wholesome influences of domesticity.  In 1557 his father sent for him to Pesaro, and Tasso made his first entrance into a Court at the age of thirteen.  This event decided the future of his existence.  Urbino was not what it had been in the time of Duke Federigo, or when Castiglione composed his Mirror of the Courtier on its model.  Yet it retained the old traditions of gentle living, splendor tempered by polite culture, aristocratic urbanity refined by arts and letters.  The evil days of Spanish manners and Spanish bigotry, of exhausted revenues and insane taxation, were but dawning; and the young prince, Francesco Maria, who was destined to survive his heir and transfer a ruined duchy to the mortmain of the Church, was now a boy of eight years old.  In fact, though the Court of Urbino labored already under that manifold disease of waste which drained the marrow of Italian principalities, its atrophy was not apparent to the eye.  It could still boast of magnificent pageants, trains of noble youths and ladies moving through its stately palaces and shady villa-gardens, academies of learned men discussing the merits of Homer and Ariosto and discoursing on the principles of poetry and drama.  Bernardo Tasso read his Amadigi in the evenings to the Duchess.  The days were spent in hunting and athletic exercises; the nights in masquerades or dances.  Love and ambition wore an external garb of ceremonious beauty; the former draped itself in sonnets, the latter in rhetorical orations.  Torquato, who was assigned as the companion in sport and study to the heir-apparent, shared in all these pleasures of the Court.  After the melancholy of Rome, his visionary nature expanded under influences which he idealized with fatal facility.  Too young to penetrate below that glittering surface, flattered by the attention paid to his personal charm or premature genius, stimulated by the conversation