Such epidemics are of no unfrequent occurrence in the history of every literature; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century the plague was common to all, and it was but natural that none should suffer so severely as that which had hitherto been the model of good taste. There seems no good reason for attributing this particular affliction to Spanish influence. Spain had her Gongora, as Italy her Marini, but there is no evidence that either taught the other. It was a prevalent malady, which left Italian prose by no means unaffected. Cardinal Bentivoglio, himself a model of pure and simple composition in prose, though in verse an admirer of Marini, says of the poet Ciampoli, redactor of briefs under Clement VIII., that his style would have been in place if he had been inditing an heroic poem. Ciampoli’s poetry was not likely to be more chastened than his prose; and in truth the determination to dazzle and astonish at any cost was inevitably most conspicuous in the branch of literature where a divine transport, when real and not simulated, is rightly held to excuse many lapses from absolute purity of diction; and where, as was also to be expected, the arch offender was a man of genuine gifts, who with more natural refinement and moral earnestness might have regenerated the literature of his country, but whose false brilliancy only served to lure it further astray. It is the best apology of GIOVANNI BATTISTA MARINI (1569-1625) to have been born a Neapolitan. From the days of Statius till now, these vehement children of the South have been great improvisers. Could we look upon Marini in this light, we should find little but his voluptuousness to censure, and should be compelled to admire him in some measure as a remarkable phenomenon, only lamenting that his contemporaries should have mistaken a _lusus naturæ_ for an inspired genius, a calculating boy for a Newton or a Galileo. It might indeed have been better for Marini if he had trusted more to his natural faculty for improvisation. “His first strokes,” says Settembrini, “are sometimes beautiful, and if he left them as they were all would be well, but he touches and retouches until they are quite blurred.” This refers to the descriptions in his _Adone_ (1623), a poem which is nothing but description. Adonis does nothing, but is carried involuntarily through a series of situations contrived to display the pictorial power of the poet. The showman makes the puppet dance, and the puppet returns the compliment. There is no story, no moral, no character, no inner unity, nothing but forty-five thousand lines of word-painting, rich and brilliant indeed, but commonplace in so far as the poet sees nothing invisible to ordinary eyes, and evinces no originality in his manner of regarding man and nature.