This prodigy of youthful genius no sooner appeared than it was hailed with acclamation throughout Italy, and eager inquiries from every quarter were made concerning the author--that prodigality of praise might be lavished upon him by the learned, and parsimony of recompence, doled out to him by princes, ambitious of attaching so great a "natural curiosity" to the collection of live rarities about their palaces. For the great of those times coveted the glory, little as they liked the expense, of retaining men of talents in the train of their sycophants and dependents, even when they regarded them only as remarkable among their species, in the same manner as the lions, tigers, eagles, peacocks, and other strange and beautiful animals in their menageries were in comparison with the meaner ranks of brutes. Ariosto, who had experienced all the bitterness of such favour, and felt keenly the ignominy of such distinction, plainly tells us, that the patrons of his day loved those of their parasites who would minister to their personal necessities, pull off and on their boots, share in their orgies, and pander to their vices,--rather than those, whose proud stomachs disdained to allow them to be any thing less than themselves within the precincts of courts,--poets among princes, who could give enduring lustre to the names of inglorious patrons, which otherwise would have found no better memorial than the registers of their births, marriages, and deaths in their family genealogies. After Torquato's emancipation from the trammels of law by the hand of the parent who had so carefully involved him in them,--flushed with the new wine of liberty, obtained at the surrender of every thing else in prospect, and with nothing but itself in possession,--he repaired to Bologna, to pursue his philosophical studies and indulge in his poetical passion;--for poetry was truly to him a passion, and the ruling one of his existence,--honour, fortune, ease, pleasure, were all in turns but ministers _to_ this, while _by_ this he aimed at the acquisition of each of them, as the one or the other were, for the moment, the object of desire or the subject of lamentation for having lost it. But from Bologna he was expelled for a literary squib, the only thing of the kind by which he has gained any celebrity, whether it were his own or not. Some anonymous censor had been amusing himself with publishing pasquinades, ridiculing the principal people of the city, as well as the students of the college, with "much malice and a little wit." Those who were exposed to these sarcasms were exceedingly galled by the firing from this ambuscade of the pen, and the more so as they knew not on whom to wreak their vengeance. Torquato, in the reckless gaiety of a youth of twenty, on a certain occasion making himself merry among his companions by repeating one of these, was immediately pounced upon as the author, not only of the unlucky lines, with which he had been caught in his mouth,