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336 more of such tasteless pseudo-metaphysics as have been exemplified above in Cowley's Mistress than in Marino's Lira. It is not in virtue of his conceits that the latter is a decadent. Marino's conceits are not worse than Shakespeare's can be. It is the absence from his poetry of any other quality than prettiness and cleverness—its barrenness of any interest of content beyond an appeal to prurience and love of flattery; and this barrenness is not so apparent in his earlier lyrical poetry as in his later idylls and epics.

For Marino's experience as the favourite poet of Italy, caressed and flattered by cardinals and princes, did not improve his poetry in spirit or form. His eulogies are vapid and rococo; his Sampogna a collection of idylls which suggest nothing so much as the libretto of an opera; the Galleria a further series of elegancies. The great work of these years was the Adone, which had been begun at Rome as an idyll, and consisted in 1614 of four books. It was, apparently, the adulation Marino received in France, the desire to vie with Tasso in an heroic poem, the inability of his lyrical and idyllic genius to rise to the height of a Gerusalemme Distrutta (of which one book was composed), that induced him to fall back on the line he had made his own—the line of voluptuous, facile, ornate description,—but to expand the Adone into an epic by the addition of other idylls planned for the Sampogna, of the astronomy and philosophy which were to have been the subject of a