oem 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 Neapolita