Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/365

Rh natural and effective, the phrasing felicitous and dignified. There are not many poems in which figure and thought are more happily matched than in the "Ruscelletto orgoglioso," which excited Leopardi's enthusiasm, an Horatian ode on overweening vanity, in which the poet contrasts the noisy babbling of a rain-swollen stream with the silent and stately flow of the river Po bearing onward its freight of vessels.

One of the most learned, acute, and paradoxical writers of the century was Alessandro Tassoni (1565-1635), whose life was a continuous literary warfare. Educated at Bologna and Ferrara, he was a member of the most famous academies, while, in the service of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, he twice visited Spain. He supported the Duke of Savoy in 1615 by two fiery Filippiche contra gli Spagnuoli, which he had afterwards to repudiate; and although some barren honours were bestowed on him, it seems doubtful if he was ever a persona grata with Carlo Emanuele. He died at Modena, where his statue has been erected.

Tassoni had a large measure of Dr Johnson's dislike of cant, and the tendency to be carried by that dislike into the defence of paradox. In his earliest work, the Parte de' quesiti di A. Tassoni (1608)—which was expanded afterwards into the Pensieri Diversi—he criticised Aristotle more from impatience