essed 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.

[Footnote 185: Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose
heart is closed to love, appears before us thus:

Oh Silvio, Silvio! a che ti die Natura
Ne' piu begli anni tuoi
Fior di belta si delicato e vago,
Se tu se' tanto a calpestarlo intento?
Che s'avess'io cotesta tua si bella
E si fiorita guancia,
Addio selve, direi:
E seguendo altre fere,
E la vita passando in festa e'n gioco,
Farei la state all'ombra, e 'l verno al foco.
]

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--

La lusinga de