The Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandino made him private secretary, and took him on a journey to Ravenna and Turin.  From the commencement to the end of his literary career Marino’s march through life was one triumphal progress.  At Turin, as formerly in Naples and Rome, he achieved a notable success.  The Duke of Savoy, Carlo Emmanuele, offered him a place at Court, appointed him secretary, and dubbed him Knight of S. Maurice.

      Vidi la corte, e nella corte io vidi
    Promesse lunghe e guiderdoni avari,
    Favori ingiusti e patrocini infidi,
    Speranze dolci e pentimenti amari,
    Sorrisi traditor, vezzi omicidi,
    Ed acquisti dubbiosi e danni chiari,
    E voti vani ed idoli bugiardi,
    Onde il male e sicuro e il ben vien tardi.

It was the custom of all poets in that age to live in Courts and to abuse them, to adulate princes and to vilify these patrons.  Marino, however, had real cause to complain of the treachery of courtiers.  He appears to have been a man of easy-going temper, popular among acquaintances, and serviceable to the society he frequented.  This comradely disposition did not save him, however, from jealousies and hatreds; for he had, besides, a Neapolitan’s inclination for satire.  There was a Genoese poetaster named Gasparo Murtola established in Court-service at Turin, who had recently composed a lumbering poem, Il Mondo Creato.  Marino made fun of it in a sonnet; Murtola retorted; and a warfare of invectives began which equaled for scurrility and filth the duels of Poggio and Valla.  Murtola, seeing that he was likely to be worsted by his livelier antagonist, waited for him one day round a corner, gun in hand.  The gun was discharged, and wounded, not Marino, but a favorite servant of the duke.  For this offense the assassin was condemned to death; and would apparently have been executed, but for Marino’s generosity.  He procured his enemy’s pardon, and was repaid with the blackest ingratitude.  On his release from prison Murtola laid hands upon a satire, La Cuccagna, written some time previously by his rival.  This he laid before the duke, as a seditious attack upon the government of Savoy.  Marino now in his turn was imprisoned; but he proved, through the intervention of Manso, that the Cuccagna had been published long before his arrival at Turin.  Disgusted by these incidents, he next accepted an invitation from the French Court, and journeyed to Paris in 1615, where the Italianated society of that city received him like a living Phoebus.  Maria de Medici, as Regent, with Concini for her counselor and lover, was then in all her vulgar glory.  Richelieu’s star had not arisen to eclipse Italian intrigue and to form French taste by the Academy.  D’Urfe and Du Bartas, more marinistic than Marino, more euphuistic than Euphues, gave laws to literature; and the pageant pictures by Rubens, which still adorn the Gallery of the Louvre, marked the full-blown and sensuous splendor