Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/345

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studying the poetry of Italy in the seventeenth century, one finds oneself face to face with a phenomenon to which that much abused term decadence can be more intelligibly and legitimately applied than to anything in English or French poetry of the same period. In the affectations of Marino and his contemporaries—and one may not except altogether Chiabrera and Tassoni—we see an art which, whatever its limitations, had