[Footnote 184:  I might have further illustrated this point by quoting the thirty-five lines in which Titiro compares a maiden to the rose which fades upon the spray after the fervors of the noon have robbed its freshness (act i. sc. 4).  To contest the beauty of the comparison would be impossible.  Yet when we turn to the two passages in Ariosto (Orl.  Fur. i. 42, 43, and xxiv. 80) on which it has been modeled, we shall perceive how much Guarini lost in force by not writing with his eye upon the object or with the authenticity of inward vision, but with a self-conscious effort to improve by artifices and refinements upon something he has read.  See my essay on ‘The Pathos of the Rose in Time,’ April, 1886.]

Though the scene of the Pastor Fido was laid in Arcadia, the play really represented polite Italian society.  In the softness of its sentiment, its voluptuous verbal melody, and its reiterated descant upon effeminate love-pleasure, it corresponded exactly to the spirit of its age.[185] This was the secret of its success; and this explains its seduction.  Not Corisca’s wanton blandishments and professed cynicism, but Mirtillo’s rapturous dithyrambs on kissing, Dorinda’s melting moods of tenderness, and Amarilli’s delicate regrets that love must be postponed to honor, justified Bellarmino’s censure.  Without anywhere transgressing the limits of decorum, the Pastor Fido is steeped in sensuousness.  The sentiment of love idealized in Mirtillo and Amarilli is pure and self-sacrificing. Ama l’onesta mia, s’amante sei, says this maiden to her lover; and he obeys her.  Yet, though the drama is dedicated to virtue, no one can read it without perceiving the blandishments of its luxurious rhetoric.  The sensual refinement proper to an age of social decadence found in it exact expression, and it became the code of gallantry for the next two centuries.

[Footnote 185:  Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose heart is closed to love, appears before us thus: 

    Oh Silvio, Silvio! a che ti die Natura
    Ne’ piu begli anni tuoi
    Fior di belta si delicato e vago,
    Se tu se’ tanto a calpestarlo intento? 
    Che s’avess’io cotesta tua si bella
    E si fiorita guancia,
    Addio selve, direi: 
    E seguendo altre fere,
    E la vita passando in festa e’n gioco,
    Farei la state all’ombra, e ’l verno al foco.
]

Meanwhile the literary dictator of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly Marino.  On him devolved the scepter which Petrarch bequeathed to Politian, Politian to Bembo, and Bembo to Torquato Tasso.  In natural gifts he was no unworthy successor of these poets, though the gifts he shared with them were conspicuously employed by him for purposes below the scope of any of his predecessors.  In artistic achievement he concentrated the less admirable qualities of all, and brought the Italian poetry of the Renaissance