While Bernardo was at Naples, he commenced a poem of the romantic class on the adventures of Amadis de Gaul, or "Amadigi," as the work is entitled. This he projected upon the regular plan of a fable, having a beginning, middle, and end; but he was not of sufficient authority to establish, by his example, a classical form of epic, though his more successful and more gifted son seems to have borrowed the idea of doing that from him. When he read the first cantos of this performance, as originally constructed, he observed, that though the presence chamber of the court of Salerno was well filled at first with eager and expecting auditors, before he had done nearly all of them had disappeared. From this he concluded (not suspecting any deficiency of power in himself), that the unity of action prescribed by the severer critics was, in its very nature, not agreeable to nature in art, knowing that he had punctiliously observed all the rules of the latter. This failure, enforced by the persuasions of his friends, and the commands of the prince, induced him to remodel what he had written, and elaborate the remainder after the precedents of Pulci, Bojardo, and Ariosto. The work was extended to a hundred cantos, and, when published, was so well received, that the author had cause to congratulate himself on having met the public taste and gratified it; but it was the public taste of the day only, for his poem passed away with the fashion of it, and is now remembered among "things that were," while the three productions of his afore-named predecessors still keep their graduated rank of ascent, and find readers in every age, notwithstanding all the defects and excesses that may be charged upon them. Bernardo's failed; less, perhaps, because of its inferiority, than because it did not display the proportionate superiority which the others had each in turn manifested over all its respective forerunners. It was while Bernardo resided at Sorrento, a city in the vicinity of Naples, where he occupied a palace overlooking the sea, happy in his home, and prosperous, or rather promising himself prosperity in his fortune, the prince of Salerno having released him from all burdensome duties in his service, that his son Torquato, the second of that name (the first having died young), was born, on the 11th of March, 1544. Sorrento is here put down as the birth-place of the poet, among other cities contending for that honour, like those seven ----"that strove for Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begg'd his bread." _Ath. I._ 384.