confused him; and he mistook the lumber of miscellaneous reading for philosophy.  Then a reaction set in.  He remembered those childish ecstasies before the Eucharist:  he recalled the pictures of a burning hell his Jesuit teachers had painted; he heard the trumpets of the Day of Judgment, and the sentence ’Go ye wicked!’ On the brink of heresy he trembled and recoiled.  The spirit of the coming age, the spirit of Bruno, was not in him.  To all appearances he had not heard of the Copernican discovery.  He wished to remain a true son of the Church, and was in fact of such stuff as the Catholic Revival wanted.  Yet the memory of these early doubts clung to him, principally, we may believe, because he had not force to purge them either by severe science or by vivid faith.  Later, when his mind was yielding to disorder, they returned in the form of torturing scruples and vain terrors, which his fervent but superficial pietism, his imaginative but sensuous religion, were unable to efface.  Meanwhile, with one part of his mind devoted to these problems, the larger and the livelier was occupied with poetry.  To law, the Brod-Studium indicated by his position in the world, he only paid perfunctory attention.  The consequence was that before he had completed two years of residence in Padua, his first long poem, the Rinaldo, saw the light.  In another chapter I mean to discuss the development of Tasso’s literary theories and achievements.  It is enough here to say that the applause which greeted the Rinaldo, conquered his father’s opposition.  Proud of its success, Bernardo had it printed, and Torquato in the beginning of his nineteenth year counted among the notable romantic poets of his country.

At the end of 1563, Tasso received an invitation to transfer himself from Padua to Bologna.  This proposal came from Monsignor Cesi, who had recently been appointed by Pope Pius IV. to superintend public studies in that city.  The university was being placed on a new footing, and to secure the presence of a young man already famous seemed desirable.  An exhibition was therefore offered as an inducement; and this Tasso readily accepted.  He spent about two years at Bologna, studying philosophy and literature, planning his Dialogues on the Art of Poetry, and making projects for an epic on the history of Godfred.  Yet in spite of public admiration and official favor, things did not go smoothly with Tasso at Bologna.  One main defect of his character, which was a want of tact, began to manifest itself.  He showed Monsignor Cesi that he had a poor opinion of his literary judgment, came into collision with the pedants who despised Italian, and finally uttered satiric epigrams in writing on various members of the university.  Other students indulged their humor in like pasquinades.  But those of Tasso were biting, and he had not contrived to render himself generally popular.  His rooms were ransacked, his papers searched; and finding himself