but he was assailed as being the secret manufacturer of all the rest. It was in vain that he denied the charge indignantly, and challenged his accusers for the proofs, urging that he himself had been the butt of the sharp-shooter's shafts, flying out of darkness and hitting in broad day. His papers were seized and examined before the criminal magistrate; but nothing being discovered to fix the imputation upon him, he was nominally acquitted, though the suspicion was not so easily effaced from the minds of the offended individuals. He took the matter himself in such dudgeon, that he precipitately left Bologna, and removed to Padua, whither he had been Invited by his early friend Scipio Gonzaga, who had lately established in the latter city the academy _Degli Eterei_, of which Tasso--certainly one of the most congenial spirits of the age--was worthily enrolled a member, and, according to the pedantic fashion of those pompous but puerile institutions, assumed the name of _Pentito_--for some fanciful reason not well explained, though there has been no small wrangling about it. To enlarge his mind, to exalt his imagination, and to enrich his eloquence, Torquato now devoted much of his attention to the works of Aristotle and Plato; but while the former subjected his reason to the severest discipline in the ascertainment of principles of truth, he gave his whole soul to the guidance of the latter, whose visionary splendour and profound speculations, on subjects the highest that created intelligences can conceive, and of which comparatively so little can be learned without "light from heaven" to illumine the "light of nature,"--while infinite space is afforded for everlasting conjectures, showing at once the capabilities and the limitations of the human intellect,--these peculiarly suited the young student's cast of thought and intense delight in contemplating the things that are invisible and eternal, as associated with things seen and perishable. Nor was the philosophical poet an unworthy disciple of the poetical philosopher, even upon his own ground and in his own style. Many of Tasso's sublimest compositions are in the form of dialogues, in which he discourses with an elevation of sentiment and a power of diction which might have gained admiration in the school of his master himself.