Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/367

Rh cities, provoked by a trifling cause (the carrying off of a well-bucket during a raid), waged by realistic everyday Italians of the seventeenth century, in a style in which the dignified and picturesque diction of epic is interchanged with coarse and dialectal colloquialism, and with all the machinery of the heroic poem, was undoubtedly suggested to Tassoni by Don Quixote, to which he more than once makes reference. There is little of Cervantes' sympathetic humour, however, in the dry crackling laughter with which Tassoni describes the exploits of the Potta and his followers and foes. His characters are utterly unattractive, and the episodes in which the Conte di Culagna (who stands for the poet's chief enemy, Alessandro Brusantini) is proved "a coward and a cuckold-knave" are more malevolent than amusing. But the scheme of a mock-epic is sustained with the greatest skill, and Tassoni, who evidently had read the romantic epics with the same pleasure that Cervantes read romances, does not let the intention of parody prevent his describing the battles with vigour and gusto; and he has two episodes in the picturesque, voluptuous style of Marino. With a larger purpose and a little of Cervantes' humanity Tassoni might have written a great as well as a clever poem. His strangely critical and negative mind touched with acid all the literary idols of Italy, but he indicated no fresh direction and descried no new ideals.

Mellifluous verse is the most unequivocal excellence of Marino's Sampogna and Adone, and it was in the linking of flowing verse of no very high poetical