e of the peculiarities of those mediaeval struggles
which roused the rivalry of towns separated from each other by a few
miles of fertile country, and which raged through generations till the
real interests at issue were confounded in blind animosity of neighbor
against neighbor--was the sense of humor and of sarcasm they encouraged.
To hurl dead donkey against your enemy's town-wall passed for a good
joke, and discredited his honor more than the loss of a hundred fighting
men in a pitched battle. Frontier fortresses received insulting names,
like the Perugian _Becca di questo_, or like the Bolognese _Grevalcore_.
There was much, in fact, in these Italian wars which reminds one of the
hostilities between rival houses in a public school.

Such being the element of humor ready to hand in the annals of his
country, Tassoni chose the episode of the Bolognese bucket for the theme
of a mock-heroic epic. He made what had been an insignificant incident
the real occasion of the war, and grouped the facts of history around it
by ingenious distortions of the truth. The bucket is the Helen of his
Iliad:[200]

Vedrai s'al cantar mio porgi l'orecchia,
Elena trasformarsi in una secchia.

[Footnote 200: Canto i. 2.]

A mere trifle thus becomes a point of dispute capable of bringing gods,
popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into
conflict. At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing
as little as possible from the main current of actual events. History
lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and
earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any
moral to be derived from the _Secchia Rapita_ we have it here. At the
end of the contention, when both parties are exhausted, it is found
that the person of a king weighs in the scale of nations no more than an
empty bucket:[201]

Riserbando ne' patti a i Modanesi
La secchia, e 'l re de'Sardi ai Bolognesi.

Such is the main subject of the _Secchia Rapita_; and such is Tassoni's
irony, an irony worthy of Aristophanes in its far-reaching indulgent
contempt for human circumstance. But the poem has another object. It was
written to punish Count Alessandro Brusantini. The leading episode,
which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate
vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible Conte
di Culagna.

Tassoni's method of art corresponds to the irony of his insp