Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/350

330 wrote a laudatory preface to the Adone, as well as of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. His influence is the predominant one in the refined work of the Scottish Drummond, and was not unfelt by Crashaw and Cowley; while in Holland, Hooft placed Petrarch and Marino at the head of Italian poets. A writer of such widespread influence deserves more careful study than has always been given to him, and fuller treatment than can be allowed here.

The son of a Neapolitan lawyer, Marino was turned out of doors by his father for debt, dissipation, and devotion to poetry. At the age of twenty he had already made himself famous throughout Italy by his voluptuous and musical Canzone dei Baci, and he had no difficulty in finding patrons, including the Marquis of Manso, at whose house he made the acquaintance and won the esteem of Tasso. His share in a scandalous abduction drove him to Rome, where he found fresh patrons in Crescenzio, the Pope's chamberlain, and Cardinal Aldobrandini. From Rome he accompanied the latter to Ravenna, and thence to the Court of Savoy, where his reputation as a poet and panegyrist gained him the favour of Carlo Emanuele. His quarrel with the poet Murtola, the scurrilous sonnets they wrote on one another, the attempt Murtola made on Marino's life, and the imprisonment of the latter, need not be detailed. In 1615 he left Milan for Paris, whither he had been invited by Margaret of Valois, and where he was granted a pension by Maria de' Medici. Here he enlarged, completed, and published the Adone in 1623.