Bernardo, though a sound Catholic, was no bigot; and he had the good sense to choose an able master for his son--'a man of profound learning, possessed of both the ancient languages, whose method of teaching is the finest and most time-saving that has yet been tried; a gentleman withal, with nothing of the pedant in him.'[6] The boy was lucky also in the companion of his studies, a cousin, Cristoforo Tasso, who had come from Bergamo to profit by the tutor's care.
[Footnote 6: Bernardo's _Letter to Cav.

Giangiacopo Tasso_, December 6, 1554.] The young Tasso's home cannot, however, have been a cheerful one.

The elderly hidalgo sitting up in bed to darn a single pair of hose, the absent mother pining for her husband and tormented by her savage brother's avarice, environed the precocious child of ten with sad presentiments.

That melancholy temperament which he inherited from Bernardo was nourished by the half-concealed mysteriously-haunting troubles of his parents.

And when Porzia died suddenly, in 1556, we can hardly doubt that the father broke out before his son into some such expressions of ungovernable grief as he openly expressed in the letter to Amerigo Sanseverino.[7] Is it possible, then, thought Torquato, that the mother from whose tender kisses and streaming tears I was severed but one year ago,[8] has died of poison--poisoned by my uncles?
Sinking into the consciousness of a child so sensitive by nature and so early toned to sadness, this terrible suspicion of a secret death by poison incorporated itself with the very essence of his melancholy humor, and lurked within him to flash forth in madness at a future period of life.
That he was well acquainted with the doleful situation of his family is proved by his first extant letter.