al 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, discourses 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 p