The youth displayed as much love and more aptitude for poetical composition. When he was eighteen, he published his epic, _Rinaldo,_ a wonderfully mature work for so young a writer. Torquato Tasso was one of those poets who produce their finest works in the earlier portion of their career. The works by which alone he is remembered, were all produced before his thirty-second year. His mind attained full mastery over its powers at a very early period, and when, like the voice of a singer, it lost its freshness, it also lost its charm. Corneille and Tennyson resemble him in this peculiarity of producing their masterpieces in comparative youth, but in their case, the division between the two periods is not quite so marked as in his. Corneille produced no really great drama after _La Mort de Pompée,_ but some of his later tragedies have occasional flashes of his early fire. Tennyson gave no memorable creation to the world after _Maud,_ but his _Idylls of the King_ offer some poetical details, and a few lyrics are not devoid of that perfection which characterised his previous poems. But Tasso produced absolutely nothing that could, by any stretch of indulgence, be said to add to his renown after the publication of the _Gerusalemme Liberata._ On the contrary, he rather injured his reputation by yielding to the cavils of his detractors, and re-writing his great work under the title of _Gerusalemme Conquistata,_ and producing an epic so feeble and lifeless that it immediately sank into utter neglect.
Precocious as he was in the manifestation of brilliant genius, his father was anxious that such powers should be cultivated to the utmost, and Torquato was sent to study law at Padua. But the law was little to his taste. His _Rinaldo_ procured him immense renown, and he found it more agreeable to bask in the sunshine of the brilliant society that courted him in the dawn of his celebrity, than to spend laborious hours in the pursuit of a dry and distasteful science. No poet at so early an age ever had so brilliant a prospect of renown and fortune before him. But the very extent of the admiration he excited laid the foundations of the terrible disasters that were to overtake him ere many years had elapsed.