The Pastor Fido was written in open emulation of Tasso's Aminta, and many of its most brilliant passages are borrowed from that play. Such, for example, is the Chorus on the Golden Age which closes the fourth act. Such, too, is the long description by Mirtillo of the kiss he stole from Amarilli (act ii. sc. 1). The motive here is taken from Rinaldo (canto v.), and the spirit from Aminta (act i. sc. 2). Guarini's Satyr is a studied picture from the sketch in Tasso's pastoral. The dialogue between Silvio and Linco (act i. sc. 1) with its lyrical refrain:

reproduces the dialogue between Silvia and Dafne (act i. sc. 1) with its similar refrain:

In all these instances Guarini works up Tasso's motives into more elaborate forms. He expands the simple suggestions of his model; and employs the artifices of rhetoric where Tasso yielded to inspiration. One example will suffice to contrast the methods of the spontaneous and the reflective poet. Tasso with divine impulse had exclaimed:

This, in Guarini's hands, becomes:

Here a laborious effort of the constructive fancy has been substituted for a single flash of sympathetic imagination. Tasso does not doubt that the nightingale is pouring out her love in song. Guarini says that if the bird had human soul, it would exclaim, Ardo d'amore. Tasso sees it flying from branch to branch. Guarini teases our sense of mental vision by particularizing pine and beech and myrtle. The same is true of Linco's speech in general when compared with Dafne's on the ruling power of love in earth and heaven.

Of imagination in the true sense of the term Guarini had none. Of fancy, dwelling gracefully, ingeniously, suggestively, upon externals he had plenty. The minute care with which he worked out each vein of thought and spun each thread of sentiment, was that of the rhetorician rather than the poet. Tasso had made Aminta say:

Now listen to Guarini's Mirtillo:

This is enough to illustrate Guarini's laborious method of adding touch to touch without augmenting th force of the picture.[184] We find already here the transition from Tasso's measured art to the fantastic prolixity of Marino. And though Guarini was upon the whole chaste in use of language, his rhetorical love of amplification and fanciful refinement not unfrequently betrayed him into Marinistic conceits. Dorinda, for instance, thus addresses Silvio (act iv. sc. 9):

Sighs are said to be (act i. sc. 2):

From this to the style of the Adone there was only one step to be taken.

Though the scene of the Pastor Fido was laid in Arcadia, the play really represented polite Italian society. In the softness of its sentiment, its voluptuous verbal melody, and its reiterated descant upon effeminate love-pleasure, it corresponded exactly to the spirit of its age.[185] This was the secret of its success; and this explains its seduction. Not Corisca's wanton blandishments and professed cynicism, but Mirtillo's rapturous dithyrambs on kissing, Dorinda's melting moods of tenderness, and Amarilli's delicate regrets that love must be postponed to honor, justified Bellarmino's censure. Without anywhere transgressing the limits of decorum, the Pastor Fido is steeped in sensuousness. The sentiment of love idealized in Mirtillo and Amarilli is pure and self-sacrificing. Ama l'onesta mia, s'amante sei, says this maiden to her lover; and he obeys her. Yet, though the drama is dedicated to virtue, no one can read it without perceiving the blandishments of its luxurious rhetoric. The sensual refinement proper to an age of social decadence found in it exact expression, and it became the code of gallantry for the next two centuries.

Meanwhile the literary dictator of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly Marino. On him devolved the scepter which Petrarch bequeathed to Politian, Politian to Bembo, and Bembo to Torquato Tasso. In natural gifts he was no unworthy successor of these poets, though the gifts he shared with them were conspicuously employed by him for purposes below the scope of any of his predecessors. In artistic achievement he concentrated the less admirable qualities of all, and brought the Italian poetry of the Renaissance to a close by exaggerating its previous defects. Yet, as a man, Marino is interesting, more interesting in many respects than the melancholy discontented Tasso. He accepted the conditions of his age with genial and careless sympathy, making himself at once its idol, its interpreter, and its buffoon. Finally, he illustrates the law of change which transferred to Neapolitans in this age the scepter which had formerly been swayed by Tuscans and Lombards.[186]

Giovanni Battista Marino was born at Naples in 1569. His father, a jurist of eminence, bred him for the law. But the attractions of poetry and pleasure were irresistible by this mobile son of the warm South—

Such, in the poet's maturity, was his judgment upon law; and probably he expressed the same opinion with frankness in his youth. Seeing these dispositions in his son, the severe parent cast him out of doors, and young Marino was free to indulge vagabond instincts with lazzaroni and loose companions on the quays and strands of Naples. In that luxurious climate a healthy native, full of youth and vigor, needs but little to support existence. Marino set his wits to work, and reaped too facile laurels in the fields of Venus and the Muses. His verses speedily attracted the notice of noble patrons, among whom the Duke of Bovino, the Prince of Conca, and Tasso's friend the Marquis Manso have to be commemorated. They took care that so genuine and genial a poet should not starve. It was in one of Manso's palaces that Marino had an opportunity of worshiping the singer of Armida and Erminia at a distance. He had already acquired dubious celebrity as a juvenile Don Juan and a writer of audaciously licentious lyrics, when disaster overtook him. He assisted one of his profligate friends in the abduction of a girl. For this breach of the law both were thrown together into prison, and Marino only escaped justice by the sudden death of his accomplice. His patrons now thought it desirable that he should leave Naples for a time. Accordingly they sent him with letters of recommendation to Rome, where he was well received by members of the Crescenzio and Aldobrandino families. The Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandino made him private secretary, and took him on a journey to Ravenna and Turin. From the commencement to the end of his literary career Marino's march through life was one triumphal progress. At Turin, as formerly in Naples and Rome, he achieved a notable success. The Duke of Savoy, Carlo Emmanuele, offered him a place at Court, appointed him secretary, and dubbed him Knight of S. Maurice.

It was the custom of all poets in that age to live in Courts and to abuse them, to adulate princes and to vilify these patrons. Marino, however, had real cause to complain of the treachery of courtiers. He appears to have been a man of easy-going temper, popular among acquaintances, and serviceable to the society he frequented. This comradely disposition did not save him, however, from jealousies and hatreds; for he had, besides, a Neapolitan's inclination for satire. There was a Genoese poetaster named Gasparo Murtola established in Court-service at Turin, who had recently composed a lumbering poem, Il Mondo Creato. Marino made fun of it in a sonnet; Murtola retorted; and a warfare of invectives began which equaled for scurrility and filth the duels of Poggio and Valla. Murtola, seeing that he was likely to be worsted by his livelier antagonist, waited for him one day round a corner, gun in hand. The gun was discharged, and wounded, not Marino, but a favorite servant of the duke. For this offense the assassin was condemned to death; and would apparently have been executed, but for Marino's generosity. He procured his enemy's pardon, and was repaid with the blackest ingratitude. On his release from prison Murtola laid hands upon a satire, La Cuccagna, written some time previously by his rival. This he laid before the duke, as a seditious attack upon the government of Savoy. Marino now in his turn was imprisoned; but he proved, through the intervention of Manso, that the Cuccagna had been published long before his arrival at Turin. Disgusted by these incidents, he next accepted an invitation from the French Court, and journeyed to Paris in 1615, where the Italianated society of that city received him like a living Phoebus. Maria de Medici, as Regent, with Concini for her counselor and lover, was then in all her vulgar glory. Richelieu's star had not arisen to eclipse Italian intrigue and to form French taste by the Academy. D'Urfè and Du Bartas, more marinistic than Marino, more euphuistic than Euphues, gave laws to literature; and the pageant pictures by Rubens, which still adorn the Gallery of the Louvre, marked the full-blown and sensuous splendor of Maria's equipage. Marino's genius corresponded nicely to the environment in which he now found himself; the Italians of the French Court discerned in him the poet who could best express their ideal of existence. He was idolized, glutted with gold, indulged and flattered to the top of his bent. Yearly appointments estimated at 10,000 crowns were augmented by presents in return for complimentary verses or for copies of the poem he was then composing. This poem was the Adone, the theme of which had been suggested by Carlo Emmanuele, and which he now adroitly used as a means of flattering the French throne. First printed at Paris in 1623, its reception both there and in Italy secured apotheosis in his lifetime for the poet.[187] One minor point in this magnificent first folio edition of Adone deserves notice, as not uncharacteristic of the age. Only two Cantos out of the twenty are distinguished by anything peculiar in their engraved decorations. Of these two, the eleventh displays the shield of France; the thirteenth, which describes Falsirena's incantations and enchantments, is orna mented with the symbol of the Jesuits, IHS. For this the publishers alone were probably responsible. Yet it may stand as a parable of all-pervasive Jesuitry. Even among the roses and raptures of the most voluptuous poem of the century their presence makes itself felt, as though to hint that the Adone is capable of being used according to Jesuitical rules of casuistry A.M.D.G. One warning voice was raised before the publication of this epic. Cardinal Bentivoglio wrote from Italy beseeching Marino to 'purge it of lasciviousness in such wise that it may not have to dread the lash of our Italian censure.' Whether he followed this advice, in other words whether the original MS. of the Adone was more openly licentious than the published poem, I do not know. Anyhow, it was put upon the Index in 1627. This does not, however, appear to have impaired its popularity, or to have injured its author's reputation. Soon after the appearance of Adone, Marino, then past fifty, returned to Naples. He was desirous of reposing on his laurels, wealthy, honored, and adored, among the scenes from which he fled in danger and disgrace thirty years before. His entrance into Naples was an ovation. The Iazzaroni came to meet his coach, dancing and scattering roses; noblemen attended him on horse-back; ladies gazed on him from balconies. A banner waving to the wind announced the advent of 'that ocean of incomparable learning, soul of lyres, subject for pens, material for ink, most eloquent, most fertile, phoenix of felicity, ornament of the laurel, of swans in their divine leisure chief and uncontested leader.' At Naples he died in 1625—felicitous in not having survived the fame which attended him through life and reached its climax just before his death.

The Adone strikes us at first sight as the supreme poem of epicene voluptuousness. Its smooth-chinned hero, beautiful as a girl, soft as a girl, sentimental as a girl, with nothing of the man about him—except that 'Nature, as she wrought him, fell adoting,'—threads a labyrinth of suggestive adventures, in each of which he is more the patient than the agent of desire. Mercury introduces him to our attention in a series of those fables (tales of Narcissus, Ganymede, Cyparissus, Hylas, Atys) by which antiquity figured the seductiveness of adolescence. Venus woos him, and Falserina tries to force him. Captured in feminine attire by brigands, he is detained in a cave as the mistress of their chief, and doted on by the effeminate companion of his prison. Finally, he contends for the throne of Cyprus with a band of luxurious youths—

The crown is destined for the physically fairest. The rival charms of the competitors are minutely noted, their personal blemishes sagaciously detected, by a council of pleasure-sated worldlings. In his death Adonis succumbs to the assault of a boar, fatally inflamed with lust, who wounds the young man in his groin, dealing destruction where the beast meant only amorous caresses. Gods and godesses console Venus in her sorrow for his loss, each of whom relates the tale of similar disasters. Among these legends Apollo's love for Hyacinth and Phoebus' love for Pampinus figure conspicuously. Thus Marino's Adonis excites unhealthy interest by the spectacle of boyhood exposed to the caprices and allurements of both sexes doting on unfledged virility.

What contributes to this effect, in the central motive of the poem, is that Venus herself is no artless virgin, no innocent Chloe, corresponding to a rustic Daphnis. She is already wife, mother, adulteress, femme entretenue, before she meets the lad. Her method of treating him is that of a licentious queen, who, after seducing page or groom, keeps the instrument of her pleasures in seclusion for occasional indulgence during intervals of public business. Vulcan and Mars, her husband and her cicisbeo, contest the woman's right to this caprice; and when the god of war compels, she yields him the crapulous fruition of her charms before the eye of her disconsolate boy-paramour. Her pre-occupation with Court affairs in Cythera—balls, pageants, sacrifices, and a people's homage—brings about the catastrophe. Through her temporary neglect, Adonis falls victim to a conspiracy of the gods. Thus the part which the female plays in this amorous epic is that of an accomplished courtesan, highly placed in society. All the pathos, all the attraction of beauty and of sentiment, is reserved for the adolescent male.

This fact, though disagreeable, has to be noted. It is too characteristic of the wave of feeling at that time passing over Europe, to be ignored. The morbid strain which touched the Courts alike of Valois, Medici and Stuarts; which infected the poetry of Marlowe and of Shakespeare; which cast a sickly pallor even over sainthood and over painting in the school of Bologna, cannot be neglected. In Marino's Adone it reaches its artistic climax.[188]

This, however, is not the main point about the poem. The Adone should rather be classed as the epic of voluptuousness in all its forms and species. If the love-poetry of the Italian Renaissance began with the sensuality of Boccaccio's Amoroso Visione, it ended, after traversing the idyl, the novel, the pastoral, the elegy and the romance, in the more complex sensuality of Marino's Adone; for this, like the Amoroso Visione, but far more emphatically, proclaims the beatification of man by sexual pleasure:—

Thus voluptuousness has its transcendentalism; and Marino finds even his prolific vocabulary inadequate to express the mysteries of this heaven of sensuous delights.[189]

It must not be thought that the Adone is an obscene poem. Marino was too skillful a master in the craft of pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated society, and millinery formed a main ingredient in its love-philters.[190] Marino, therefore, took the carnal instincts for granted, and played upon them as a lutist plays the strings of some lax thrilling instrument. Of moral judg ment, of antipathy to this or that form of lust, of prejudice or preference in the material of pleasure, there is no trace. He shows himself equally indulgent to the passion of Mirra for her father, of Jove for Ganymede, of Bacchus for Pampinus, of Venus for Adonis, of Apollo for Hyacinth. He tells the disgusting story of Cinisca with the same fluent ease as the lovely tale of Psyche; passes with the same light touch over Falserina at the bedside of Adonis and Feronia in his dungeon; uses the same palette for the picture of Venus caressing Mars and the struggles of the nymph and satyr. All he demanded was a basis of soft sensuality, from which, as from putrescent soil, might spring the pale and scented flower of artful luxury.

In harmony with the spirit of an age reformed or deformed by the Catholic Revival, Marino parades cynical hypocrisy. The eighth canto of Adone is an elaborately-wrought initiation into the mysteries of carnal pleasure. It is a hymn to the sense of touch:[191]

We are led by subtle gradations, by labyrinthine delays, to the final beatification of Adonis. Picture is interwoven with picture, each in turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise. Yet while straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to seduce his reader, the poet drops of set purpose phrases like the following:

Here the ape masked in the man turns around and grins, gibbering vulgar words to point his meaning, and casting dirt on his pretended decency. While racking the resources of allusive diction to veil and to suggest an immodest movement of his hero (Adonis being goaded beyond the bounds of boyish delicacy by lascivious sights), he suddenly subsides with a knavish titter into prose:

But the end of all this practice is that innocent Adonis has been conducted by slow and artfully contrived approaches to a wanton's embrace, and that the spectators of his seduction have become, as it were, parties to his fall. To make Marino's cynicism of hypocrisy more glaring, he prefaces each canto with an allegory, declaring that Adonis and Venus symbolize the human soul abandoned to vice, and the allurements of sensuality which work its ruin. In the poem itself, meanwhile, the hero and heroine are consistently treated as a pair of enviable, devoted, and at last unfortunate lovers.[192]

It is characteristic of the mood expressed in the Adone that voluptuousness should not be passionate, but sentimental. Instead of fire, the poet gives us honeyed tears to drink, and rocks the soul upon an ever-rippling tide of Lydian melody. The acme of pleasure, as conceived by him, is kissing. Twenty-three of the most inspired stanzas of the eighth canto are allotted to a panegyric of the kiss, in which delight all other amorous delights are drowned.[193] Tasso's melancholy yearning after forbidden fruit is now replaced by satiety contemplating the image of past joys with purring satisfaction. This quality of self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent. It has to be tender, fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to passion, by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood. The most distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no intellect. He is all sentiment, sighs, tears, pliability, and sweetness.

This emasculate nature displays itself with consummate effect in the sobbing farewell, followed by the pretty pettishnesses, of the seventeenth canto.

As a contrast to his over-sweet and cloying ideal of lascivious grace, Marino counterposes extravagant forms of ugliness. He loves to describe the loathsome incantations of witches. He shows Falserina prowling among corpses on a battle-field, and injecting the congealed veins of her resuscitated victim with abominable juices. He crowds the Cave of Jealousy with monsters horrible to sight and sense; depicts the brutality of brigands; paints hideous portraits of eunuchs, deformed hags, unnameable abortions. He gloats over cruelty, and revels in violence.[194] When Mars appears upon the scene, the orchestra of lutes and cymbals with which we had been lulled to sleep, is exchanged for a Corybantic din of dissonances. Orgonte, the emblem of pride, outdoes the hyperboles of Rodomonte and the lunes of Tamburlaine. Nowhere, either in his voluptuousness or in its counterpart of disgust, is there moderation. The Hellenic precept, 'Nothing overmuch,' the gracious Greek virtue of temperate restraint, which is for art what training is for athletes, discipline for soldiers, and pruning for orchard trees, has been violated in every canto, each phrase, the slightest motive of this poem. Sensuality can bear such violation better than sublimity; therefore the perfume of voluptuousness in the Adone, though excessive, is both penetrating and profound; while those passages which aim at inspiring terror or dilating the imagination, fail totally of their effect. The ghastly, grotesque, repulsive images are so overcharged that they cease even to offend. We find ourselves in a region where tact, sense of proportion, moral judgment, and right adjustment of means to ends, have been wantonly abandoned. Marino avowed that he only aimed at surprising his readers:

But 45,000 lines of sustained astonishment, of industrious and indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of capricci and concetti, induce the stolidity of callousness. We leave off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness. For, with all his faults, Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of fascination. The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different from the pictorial and the poetical, was a quality of the seventeenth century corresponding to its defects of bad taste. And this gift no poet shared in larger measure than Marino.

Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various. Few writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity. Few display more clearly the 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' None teach the dependence of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this drunken Helot of genius. His indifference to truth, his defiance of sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have doomed him to oblivion not wholly merited. The critic, whose duty forces him to read through the Adone, will be left bewildered by the spectacle of such profuse wealth so wantonly squandered.[195] In spite of fatigue, in spite of disgust, he will probably be constrained to record his opinion that, while Tasso represented the last effort of noble poetry struggling after modern expression under out-worn forms of the Classical Revival, it was left for Marino in his levity and license to evoke a real and novel though rococo form, which nicely corresponded to the temper of his times, and determined the immediate future of art. For this reason he requires the attention which has here been paid him.

But how, it may be asked, was it possible to expand the story of Venus and Adonis into an epic of 45,000 lines? The answer to this question could best be given by an analysis of the twenty cantos: and since few living students have perused them, such a display of erudition would be pardonable. Marini does not, however, deserve so many pages in a work devoted to the close of the Italian Renaissance. It will suffice to say that the slender narrative of the amour of Venus and her boyish idol, his coronation as king of Cyprus, and his death by the boar's tusk, is ingeniously interwoven with a great variety of episodes. The poet finds occasion to relate the principal myths of Hellenic passion treating these in a style which frequently reminds us of Ovid's Metamorphoses; he borrows tales from Apuleius, Lucian, and the pastoral novelists; he develops the theme of jealousy in Mars and Vulcan, introduces his own autobiography, digresses into romantic adventures by sea and land, creates a rival to Venus in the sorceress Falserina, sketches the progress of poetry in one canto and devotes another to a panegyric of Italian princes, extols the House of France and adulates Marie de Medicis, surveys the science of the century, describes fantastic palaces and magic gardens, enters with curious minuteness into the several delights of the five senses, dis courses upon Courts, ambition, avarice and honor, journeys over the Mediterranean, conducts a game of chess through fifty brilliant stanzas; in brief, while keeping his main theme in view, is careful to excite and sustain the attention of his readers by a succession of varied and ingeniously suggested novelties. Prolixity, indefatigable straining after sensational effect, interminable description, are the defects of the Adone; but they are defects related to great qualities possessed by the author, to inexhaustible resources, curious knowledge, the improvisatore's facility, the trained rhetorician's dexterity in the use of language, the artist's fervid delight in the exercise of his craft.

Allowing for Marino's peculiar method, his Adone has the excellence of unity which was so highly prized by the poets of his age and nation. Critics have maintained that the whole epic is but a development of the episode of Rinaldo in Armida's garden. But it is more than this. It contains all the main ingredients of the Italian Romance, with the exception of chivalry and war. There is a pastoral episode corresponding to that of Erminia among the shepherds, a magnificent enchantress in the manner of Alcina, an imprisonment of the hero which reminds us of Ruggiero in Atlante's magic castle, a journey like Astolfo's to the moon, a conflict between good and evil supernatural powers, a thread of allegory more or less apparent, a side glance at contemporary history; and these elements are so combined as to render the Adone one of the many poems in the long romantic tradition. It differs mainly from its predecessors in the strict unity of subject, which subordinates each episode and each digression to the personal adventures of the heroine and hero; while the death and obsequies of Adonis afford a tragic close that is lacking to previous poems detached from the Carolingian cycle. Contemporary writers praised it as a poem of peace. But it is the poem of ignoble peace, of such peace as Italy enjoyed in servitude, when a nation of cicisbei had naught to occupy their energies but sensual pleasure. Ingenious as Marino truly was in conducting his romance upon so vast a scheme through all its windings to one issue, we feel that the slender tale of a boy's passion for the queen of courtesans and his metamorphosis into the scarlet windflower of the forest supplied no worthy motive for this intricate machinery. The metaphor of an alum basket crystallized upon a petty frame of wire occurs to us when we contemplate its glittering ornaments, and reflect upon the poverty of the sustaining theme. It might in fact stand for a symbol of the intellectual vacancy of the age which welcomed it with rapture, and of the society which formed a century of taste upon its pattern.

In another and higher literary quality the Adone represents that moment of Italian development. A foreigner may hardly pass magisterial judgment on its diction. Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best passages are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of Marinism has been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose. Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that never fails. The undulating, evenly on-flowing cantilena of his verbal music sustains the reader on a tide of song. That element of poetry, which, as I have observed, was developed with remarkable success by Tasso in some parts of the Gerusalemme is the main strength of the Adone. With Marino the Chant d'Amour never rises so high, thrills so subtly, touches the soul so sweetly and so sadly, as it does in Tasso's verse. But in all those five thousand octave stanzas it is rarely altogether absent. The singing faculty of the Neapolitan was given to this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova, an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always kept on singing. His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and exploding popguns, which deafen and distract our ears attuned to the suave cadence of the cantilena, is no less characteristic of the Neapolitan. Marino had the impro visatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial passion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his birthplace. He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and contrast to pervading beauty.

A serious fault to be found with Marino's style is its involved exaggeration in description. Who, for instance, can tolerate this picture of a young man's foot shod with a blue buskin?

Again he carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric, introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Tasso, with which luckless heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world in long soliloquies. The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina's feelings after she has felt the pangs of love for Adonis, might pass for a parody:

And so forth through eighty lines in which every conceivable change is rung upon Amo o non amo?_._._._Io vivo e moro pur_._._._Io non ho core e lo mio cor n'ha dui. With all this effort no one is convinced of Falserina's emotion, and her long-winded oration reads like a schoolboy's exercise upon some line of the fourth Aeneid. Yet if we allow the sense of rhythmical melody to intervene between our intellectual perception and Marino's language, we shall still be able to translate these outpourings into something which upon the operatic stage would keep its value. False rhetoric and the inability to stop when enough and more than enough has been said upon any theme to be developed, are the incurable defects of Marino. His profuse fioriture compared with the simpler descant of Ariosto or Tasso remind us of Rossini's florid roulades beside the grace of Pergolese's or the majesty of Marcello's song.

The peculiar quality of bad taste which is known in Italy as Marinismo, consisted in a perpetual straining after effect by antitheses, conceits, plans on words degenerating into equivocation, and such-like rhetorical grimaces. Marino's ars poetica was summed up in this sentence: 'Chi non sa far stupir, vada alia striglia.' Therefore, he finds periphrases for the simplest expressions. He calls the nightingale sirena de'boschi, gunpowder l'irreparabil fulmine terreno, Columbus il ligure Argonauta, Galileo il novello Endimione. In these instances, what might have been expanded into a simile, is substituted for the proper word in order to surprise the reader. When he alludes to Dante, he poses a conundrum on that poet's surname: Ben sull'ali liggier tre mondi canta. The younger Palma is complimented on wresting the palm from Titian and Veronese. Guido Reni is apostrophized as: Reni onde il maggior Reno all'altro cede[197] We are never safe in reading his pages from the whirr and whistle of such verbal fireworks. And yet it must be allowed that Marino's style is on the whole freer from literary affectations than that of our own Euphuists. It is only at intervals that the temptation to make a point by clever trickery seems irresistible. When he is seriously engaged upon a topic that stirs his nature to the depth, as in the eighth canto, description flows on for stanza after stanza with limpid swiftness. Another kind of artifice to which he has resort, is the repetition of a dominant word: