Such merely verbal beauty must inevitably satiate, and Marini has experienced more neglect, and even contempt, than many men of far inferior faculty. In his own day he carried all before him, and was even more admired in France than in Italy. It is at least to his credit not to have undertaken his gorgeous but empty _Adone_ until he had convinced himself of his inability to vie with Tasso in a nobler form of epic. He also composed one really dignified poem on the deplorable condition of Italy (attributed, however, by many to Fulvio Testi), and poured forth a flood of idyllic and bucolic, marine, erotic, and lyrical poetry, not devoid of striking beauties, but so disfigured by conceits as to be necessarily condemned to oblivion upon the revival of a purer taste. In some respects he might be compared to the Cowleys and Crashaws of Charles the First’s time; but he is physical, while they are metaphysical; his conceits are less far-fetched and ingenious than theirs, and few of them either could or would have produced his licentious, but, in an artistic point of view, admirable _Pastorella_. Marini’s influence on the contemporary poetry of his own country was very great; but the two or three men of genius remained unaffected by him, and the names of his multitudinous imitators are not worth preserving. His life, though chequered by scrapes and quarrels, was on the whole prosperous, and the patronage of the French court made him independent of the petty princes of Italy. He had bitter enemies in Gasparo Murtola, a poet who would be forgotten but for his and Marini’s mutual lampoons, and Tommaso Stigliani, a more considerable personage, who had enjoyed the great honour of being run through the body by the historian Davila, and whose early promise had drawn a sonnet from Tasso, remarkable for the hint it affords that Tasso himself had projected an epic upon Columbus: _Thy song Orphean, able to placate The Stygian thrones, and wailing shades appease, Stiglian, doth so upon my spirit seize, Mine own in its compare I humbly rate. And if like Autumn with thy April mate As promised by such harbingers as these, Thou’lt pass the pillared bounds of Hercules, And safe to utmost Thule navigate. Now, parted from the crowd, intrepid go, Scaling steep Helicon, thy high desire, No more in dread to wander to and fro. There swaying from a cypress hangs my lyre; Salute it in my name, and bid it know That Time and Fortune for my ill conspire._ The peculiar appropriateness of Tasso’s compliment arises from the fact that Stigliani was then engaged upon an epic on the discovery of America, which was far from justifying Torquato’s predictions.