In a letter addressed by Bernardo to his daughter, while she was yet a girl, occurs the following affecting day-dreams of the comforts of old age which he hoped to realise in her filial attentions. After exhorting her to mind her lessons, and promising in due time to provide a husband worthy of her, with whom she should live near himself, he thus fondly adverts to that closing scene of a troubled life, to which many a sufferer like him, to the last moment, looked on as a forlorn hope--forlorn, yet inexpressibly soothing, and cherished even in the heart of despair:--"Sweet and tranquil to me will be old age, when I shall see (as I hope it may be the will of God) myself perpetuated in your little ones, with my very features impictured on their countenances. Death will then appear to me less terrible, when, beholding you in honour and in peace, enjoying the love of your husband, and the delights derived from the affections of your children, you shall close with pale hands these eyes of mine. And surely it is due to a dear father to receive the last kisses, the last tears, and every other pious and tender office, from a dutiful and loving daughter." Fresh commotions in Italy rendering Rome an unsafe sojourn for the homeless Bernardo, he removed his son and his nephew to Bergamo, and fled himself to Ravenna, with two shirts and his _Amadigi_ yet uncompleted; as destitute as his contemporary Camoëns, when he escaped from shipwreck with his _Lusiad_ in one hand, and with the other buffeting the waves--thus saving at once his life and his immortality! On as troubled a sea, by land, as any breadth of water between Lisbon and Canton, not excepting that round the Cape of Storms, Bernardo was tossed to and fro throughout Italy; and continued to the last as poor, yet as sanguine, as the only genius that Portugal had hitherto produced, and proved itself unworthy to give birth to another by its neglect, if not its ingratitude and inhumanity, to that one. But here a gleam of sunshine broke upon Bernardo, amidst the darkness of his flight from Rome. The duke of Urbino invited him to Pesaro, and afforded him a welcome but temporary asylum there from the persecution of his enemies, and the pressure of indigence--a retreat, indeed, which he himself acknowledged was such as might give inspiration to any poet, and where lie, himself, in quiet and amidst that comfort to which he had lately been a stranger, might complete his long poem.