Bernardo Tasso possessed qualities of genius and temper which suited his proposed task.

Deficient in humor, he had no difficulty in eliminating that element from the _Amadigi_.

Chivalrous sentiment took the place of irony; scholarly method supplied the want of wayward fancy.
It was just at this point that the young Torquato Tasso made his first essay in poetry.

He had inherited his father's temperament, its want of humor, its melancholy, its aristocratic sensitiveness.

At the age of seventeen he was already a ripe scholar, versed in the critical questions which then agitated learned coteries in Italy.