During their residence at Venice, Torquato was much employed by his father in transcribing his own multitudinous poems and letters, as well as in preparing for the press the enormous length of the "Amadigi." By this exercise the son himself became daily more familiarised with the means and artifices by which those who excel others in the productions of their genius, form their peculiar style according to their peculiar standard of intellect, and identify their whole cast of thinking with their whole structure of language. To put a passage of an eloquent author to the nicest test of _touch_ (if the expression may be allowed for the intercourse of mind with mind, in the communication and reception of ideas splendidly conceived and felicitously bodied forth by the one, and by degrees only apprehended by the other,)--to put to the nicest test of _touch_, as it were, any eloquent passage of poet or orator, let the admirer copy it out at length, and he will find that the progress of mind, hand, and eye, going all together, and through every part, will give him the most distinct possible possession of the whole in its full proportion, minutest details, and utmost effect.
But while thus the amanuensis of his father, Torquato was not less assiduously cultivating his own talents, and meditating the composition already alluded to, in which he was soon not only to rival the former, but even while a boy, and upon the enchanted ground of romance itself, to prove a greater magician than he. This the sudden and passionate admiration with which his "Rinaldo" was hailed throughout Italy, and beyond the Alps and Pyrenees, irreversibly established. The failure of Bernardo's hopes, in the neglect with which both sovereign princes and the reading public, after the first effervescence of applause, treated his "Amadigi," was nearly contemporaneous with the first triumph of his more fortunate son, who, so far as fame could gratify or reward his literary labours, may be said to have succeeded in all that he attempted, either in prose and verse, thenceforward, though some of his performances had but an ephemeral popularity, being welcomed at first, and afterwards formally honoured from the courtesy due to their author, and the measure of kindred excellence by which they were all allied to the happier offspring of his too prolific mind. Bernardo, after he found that the stupendous monument of labour in vain, which he had spent so many years in accumulating, was likely to be left to moulder away and fall of itself into oblivion,--having at its first appearance excited neither enough of envy or admiration to render it extensively attractive to public curiosity,--lay down in despondency at its base, amidst his perished hopes; and though he made several attempts afterwards to rise, these were all equally unavailing, and the latest solace of his life was the contemplation of that glory descending upon his son which had departed from him.