ars 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.

[Footnote 187: It is worth noting that Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_
was first printed in 1593, thirty years previously.]

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--

Bardassonacci, paggi da taverna.

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
t