While Torquato was thus continually giving new pledges, and redeeming old ones of equal lustre, or surpassing the proudest names in his country's literature, the old man, from bitter but unprofitable experience as regarded himself, having proved the precariousness of the favour of princes, and the vanity of expecting fortune to follow fame in verse, determined to indemnify his son for the loss of both his parents' property by bringing him up to a profession in which wealth and honour might more readily be acquired by common industry than by idly looking for the golden rewards of genius at the hands either of aristocratic patrons, who bestow them as bounties, or of the multitude that compose the public, and who care little about the good or ill fare of those on whom their transient applauses are lavished. "So praisen babes the peacock's spotted trayne, And wondren at bright Argus' golden eye: But who rewardes him e'er the more for thy, Or feedes him once the fuller by a graine?" SPENSER, _Ecl. X._ In his seventeenth year, therefore, Bernardo placed his son at Padua, to study jurisprudence, as Petrarch and Ariosto had been condemned to do before him, by prudent parents, and like each of those hopeful sons, who were "born a father's hopes to cross, And pen a stanza when he should engross," Torquato (though it is said that he dutifully and diligently applied with his head to the study of the law) gave his heart and his hand in secret to the unportioned muse. The issue of this affiance, while he was yet embroiled in the nets of legal precedents and practice, was the "Rinaldo" already mentioned, a romantic poem, in twelve cantos. The hero is not his own champion of that name, the glory of his later poems, but one of "the million" that figure in the "Orlando Furioso"--a work which so possessed the mind of young Tasso, while he was at Venice, that he tells us he could not sleep for the fame of Ariosto. This juvenile performance is written more after the manner of that inimitable master than the "Gerusalemme;" but, though deficient in the humour and vivacity which constitute the all-binding and assimilating spell of Ariosto's tissue of episodes, and by which the reader is reconciled to wink at all the author's incongruities and caprices, Tasso's poem, nevertheless, by a more serious kind of magic, laid hold upon public feeling and so happily hit the expiring taste of his countrymen for the extravagances of chivalrous fiction, that where his father, after years of hard toil in the same fields had miscarried, the son, in ten months, achieved a triumph, of which the trophies remain to this day; "Rinaldo" being yet one of the metrical romances which are interwoven with the party coloured staple of Italian literature.