It was after the expatriated party to whom Bernardo belonged had planned an attack upon Naples, by the combined fleets of France and Turkey, which miscarried in a miserable piratical descent upon the neighbouring coast, and a disgraceful re-embarkment, that Portia and her daughter were received into a convent, and Torquato was sent to his father at Rome; who, an exile, on a bed of sickness, and in deep poverty, was solacing himself, amidst his misfortunes, with preparing a volume of his Rime for the press, and unweariedly labouring to complete his _Amadigi._ In "the eternal city," young Tasso prosecuted his studies with indefatigable assiduity, and having for companion a cousin of his own name, Christofero Tasso, a lad of indolent habits and slow capacity. He, by his example and influence, for a while happily stimulated the latter to become a worthy competitor of himself; but he soon growing tired in the course, Torquato left him, and every rival beside, far behind in every learned and liberal accomplishment. In 1556 Portia died, at Naples, never having seen her husband since his original proscription. Her illness was so brief and so violent, that Bernardo doubted whether it was poison or a broken heart that had cut her off in the prime of her years,--most of which, however, had been so melancholy, since her happiness first seemed consummated by her union with the man of her choice, and in the children of their love, that there needed no auxiliary, in this instance, for Nature to do her work in the shape of death. Meanwhile Bernardo, not being permitted to return to Naples, was compelled, by the stress of hard circumstances, to leave his daughter in the hands of those whom he had but too much reason to call her enemies, though the nearest of kin to her deceased mother. These--probably from motives of rapacity, though political rancour may have added its malignity to the cold venom of avarice--instituted a process against young Torquato, to disinherit him, under a pretence which a fiend incarnate (had such a wanderer from the abyss of lost spirits been permitted to darken the earth with his shadow) might have blushed to advance in a court of justice,--that, having followed his miserable parent to Rome, the boy (at ten years of age!) had made himself partaker of his father's imputed treason, and thereby righteously exposed himself to the same penalties of exile and confiscation. The issue of this iniquitous proceeding does not appear, except it may be gathered from the fact, that the uncles contrived to withhold Torquato's portion of his mother's dowry from him till the last year of his life: and, further to secure the control, at least, of the property by themselves, they married her daughter Cornelia, who, at fifteen years, had grown up into a beauty, to a gentleman of Sorrento, of narrow fortune, but honourable birth, in spite of the protestations of her father, whose ambition had destined her for a higher and more