There is, however, one record belonging to this happy time which must not be forgotten. It was at Padua, _Padova la dotta_, as she has been in all ages and is still called, Padua the learned, in the year 1565. Guarini was then in his twenty-eighth year, and had been a professor at Ferrara for the last eight years. Probably it was due to the circumstance that his friend and fellow-townsman, Torquato Tasso, was then pursuing his studies at Padua, that the young Ferrarese professor turned his steps in that direction, bound "on a long vacation ramble." Tasso was only one-and-twenty at the time; but he was already a member of the famous Paduan Academy of the "Etherials," which Guarini was not. And we may readily fancy the pride and pleasure with which the younger man, doing the honours of the place to his learned friend, procured him to be elected a member of the "Etherials." Guarini (so called _nel secolo_--in the world), was _Il Costante_--the "Constant One" among the "Etherials." Scipio Gonzaga, who became subsequently the famous Cardinal, spoke an oration of welcome to him on his election. Then what congratulations, what anticipations of fame, what loving protestations of eternal friendship, what naive acceptance of the importance and serious value of their Etherial Academic play, as the two youths strolling at the evening hour among the crowds of gravely clad but in no wise gravely speaking students who thronged the colonnades in deep shadow under their low-browed arches, sally forth from beneath them as the sun nears the west, on to the vast open space which lies around the great church of St. Antony! Advancing in close talk they come up to Donatello's superb equestrian statue of the Venetian General Gattamelata, and lean awhile against the tall pedestal, finishing their chat before entering the church for the evening prayer. The "Etherials" of Padua constituted one of the innumerable "Academies" which existed at that day and for a couple of centuries subsequently in every one of the hundred cities of Italy. The "Arcadian" craze was the generating cause of all of them. All the members were "shepherds;" all assumed a fancy name on becoming a member, by which they were known in literary circles; and every Academy printed all the rhymes its members strung together! Those must have been pleasant days in old Padua, before the young Professor returned to his work in the neighbouring university of Ferrara. The two young men were then, and for some time afterwards, loving friends; for they had not yet become rival poets. At the end of those ten years of university life he may be said to have entered on a new existence--to have begun life afresh--so entirely dis-severed was his old life from the new that then opened on him. Alphonso II., who had succeeded his father, Hercules II., as Duke of Ferrara in 1559, "called him to the court" in 1567, and he began life as a courtier, or a "servant" of the Duke, in the language of the country and time.