reminding the spectator of an original, of which one of the greatest merits of the imitation is the difficulty overcome in achieving it. Bernardo's vicissitudes would present a touching but melancholy contrast to those of Gil Blas of Santillane, if written in a style of seriousness and sympathy with what is most sacred in suffering, and trying in hope deferred, equal to the pungent humour and heartless indifference to what is "virtuosest, discreetest, best," in the characteristic adventures of that gay footman of fortune. But such transitions as both Bernardo and Torquato experienced, strange as they seem to us, were events of common occurrence, arising out of the state of society in the petty principalities and commonwealths of Italy in the middle ages, and long after the revival of learning, when those who followed the profession of letters were too often dependent for the means of subsistence upon the precarious patronage of haughty nobles and ostentatious ecclesiastics. The part which Torquato had to bear in the diversities of circumstance, scene, and company, into which he was thrown with his parent, was too well calculated to cherish and confirm all his natural aspirings; while those patrician sentiments, which had been instilled into him from his cradle, amidst poverty, ignominy, and all the wretchedness of ephemeral favour, ever sustained in him a lofty self-esteem, on the ground of honourable birth, the consciousness of innate genius, and the pride of acquired learning, to which had been carefully added those gentlemanly accomplishments which rendered him a fit companion for people of the highest rank in an age of extraordinary display of personal conduct and ceremonial bearing. Tasso, in addition to his peculiar advantages, excelled in all these conventional ones, except in self-control--that especially which degenerates into servility--for (though the most exquisite flatterer in the world, as thousands of panegyrical verses prove him to have been) he never learned the meaner, but more profitable, art of being a court-minion.