Fever succeeded fever, until his guardian felt that companionship with boys in play and study was the only chance of saving so frail a life as Gabriello's.

Accordingly he placed the invalid under the care of the Jesuits in their Collegio Romano.

Here the child's health revived, and his education till the age of twenty throve apace.
The Jesuits seem to have been liberal in their course of training; for young Chiabrera benefited by private conversation with Paolo Manuzio and Sperone Speroni, while he attended the lectures of Muretus in the university.
How different was this adolescence from that of Marino! Both youths grew to manhood without domestic influences; and both were conspicuous in after life for the want of that affection which abounds in Tasso.

But here the parallel between them ends.

Marino, running wild upon the streets of Naples, taking his fill of pleasure and adventure, picking up ill-digested information at hap-hazard, and forming his poetic style as nature prompted; Chiabrera, disciplined in piety and morals by Jesuit directors, imbued with erudition by an arid scholar, a formal pedant and an accomplished rhetorician, the three chief representatives of decadent Italian humanism: no contrast can be imagined greater than that which marked these two lads out for diverse paths in literature.