orata Dea.

Still we feel that Shakespeare was guilty of precisely the same verbal
impertinences. It is only intensity of feeling which prevents such lines
as:

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call:
All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more:

from being Marinistic. But it must be added that this intensity of
feeling renders the artifice employed sublimely natural. Here we lay our
finger on the crucial point at issue in any estimate of literary
mannerism. What is the force of thought, the fervor of emotion, the
acute perception of truth in nature and in man, which lies behind that
manneristic screen? If, as in the case of Shakespeare, sufficiency or
superabundance of these essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we
ignore, the euphuism. But should the quality of substance fail, then we
repudiate it and despise it. Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more
euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent
stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering
upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery
upon both summits of Parnassus. So true it is that poetry cannot be
estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents. Had Marino
written:

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down:

or:

'twould anger him
To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle
Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
Till she had laid it and conjured it down:

or:

The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon
The prick of noon:

he would have furnished his accusers with far stronger diatribes against
words of double meaning and licentious conceits than his own pages
offer. But since it was out of the fullness of world-wisdom that
Shakespeare penned those phrases for Mercutio, and set them as pendants
to the impassioned descants upon love and death which he poured from the
lips of Romeo, they pass condoned and unperceived.

Only poverty of matter and insincerity of fancy damn in Marino those
literary affectations which he held in common with a host of
writers--with Gorgias, Aeschylus, Chaeremon, Philostratus, among Greeks;
with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, Aretino, Tasso, Guarini, among
Italians; with Calderon and Cervantes, not to mention Gongora, among
Spaniards; with the foremost French and English writ