o
Petrarch's stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic
gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule. There is not a city of
Italy which Tassoni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit.
The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the
satirist vulgar phrases when he quits the grand style and, taking
Virgil's golden trumpet from his lips, slides off into a _canaille_
drawl or sluice of Billingsgate. Modena is burlesqued in her presiding
Potta, gibbeted for her filthy streets. The Sienese discover that the
world accounts them lunatics. The Florentines and Perugians are branded
for notorious vice. Roman foppery, fantastical in feminine
pretentiousness, serves as a foil to drag Culagna down into the ditch of
ignominy. Here and there, Tassoni's satire is both venomous and pungent,
as when he paints the dotage of the Empire, stabs Spanish pride of
sovereignty, and menaces the Papacy with insurrection. But for the most
part, like Horace in the phrase of Persius, he plays about the vitals of
the victims who admit him to their confidence--_admissus circum
praecordia ludit_.

[Footnote 203: Canto viii. 33, 34.]

We can but regret that so clear-sighted, so urbane and so truly
Aristophanic a satirist had not a wider field to work in.
Seventeenth-century Italy was all too narrow for his genius; and if the
_Secchia Rapita_ has lost its savor, this is less the poet's fault than
the defect of his material. He was strong enough to have brought the
Athens of Cleon, the France of Henri III., or the England of James I.
within the range of his distorting truth-revealing mirror. Yet, even as
it was, Tassoni opened several paths for modern humorists. Rabelais
might have owned that caricature of Mars and Bacchus rioting in a tavern
bed with Venus travestied as a boy, and in the morning, after
breakfasting divinely on two hundred restorative eggs, escaping with the
fear of a scandalized host and the police-court before their eyes. Yet
Rabelais would hardly have brought this cynical picture of crude
debauchery into so fine a contrast with the celestial environment of
gods and goddesses. True to his principle of effect by alternation,
Tassoni sometimes sketches the deities whom he derides, in the style of
Volpato engravings after Guido. They move across his canvas with
ethereal grace. What can be more charming than Diana visiting Endymion,
and confessing to the Loves that all her past career as h