hat 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:--

Tramortiscon di gioia ebbre e languenti
L'anime stanche, al ciel d'Amor rapite.
Gl'iterati sospiri, i rotti accenti,
Le dolcissime guerre e le ferite,
Narrar non so--fresche aure, onde correnti,
Voi che il miraste, e ben l'udiste, il dite!
Voi secretari de'felici amori,
Verdi mirti, alti pini, ombrosi allori! (Canto viii.)

[Footnote 188: Ferrari, in his _Rivolnzioni d'Italia_, vol. iii. p. 563,
obs