Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/358

338 the Adone, the last Italian poem which was an event in European literature. The decline of Italy had begun half a century earlier, but the Aminta (1573), the Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), the Pastor Fido (1590), and the Lira (1602) were all works whose influence was felt far beyond Italy. The Adone was the last of such; though both the Secchia Rapita and Marino's posthumous Strage degli Innocenti—in which the grotesquely horrible and the sentimental are exaggerated in the same way as the romantic in the Adone—begot several imitations. Marino's popularity in France was short-lived, and later criticism was disposed to include Tasso and Italian poetry generally in its condemnation of "points" and tinsel.

Marino's followers were numerous. Both in verse and prose ingenious and extravagant conceit was the fashion, not least among the preachers. Marino boasted that he had succeeded in carrying a single metaphor through each of his prose Dicerie Sacre, discourses on painting, music, and the heavens. Of the Marinist poets the best known are Claudio Acchillini (1574-1640), Girolamo Preti (died 1626), whose conception of love, however, is—except in his early idyll Salmace—purely neo-platonic and spiritual, and Antonio Muscettola, who, besides Marinistic love-verses, composed some happier imitations of Anacreon, and a few odes which won the praises of Testi. The "sudate o fuochi" with which the first opened an ode to Richelieu has remained in literary histories as a type of "secentistic" conceit.