discipline for soldiers, and pruning for orchard trees, has been violated in every canto, each phrase, the slightest motive of this poem.  Sensuality can bear such violation better than sublimity; therefore the perfume of voluptuousness in the Adone, though excessive, is both penetrating and profound; while those passages which aim at inspiring terror or dilating the imagination, fail totally of their effect.  The ghastly, grotesque, repulsive images are so overcharged that they cease even to offend.  We find ourselves in a region where tact, sense of proportion, moral judgment, and right adjustment of means to ends, have been wantonly abandoned.  Marino avowed that he only aimed at surprising his readers: 

    E del poeta il fin la meraviglia.

[Footnote 194:  See the climax to the episode of Filauro and Filora.]

But 45,000 lines of sustained astonishment, of industrious and indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of capricci and concetti, induce the stolidity of callousness.  We leave off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness.  For, with all his faults, Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of fascination.  The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different from the pictorial and the poetical, was a quality of the seventeenth century corresponding to its defects of bad taste.  And this gift no poet shared in larger measure than Marino.

Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various.  Few writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity.  Few display more clearly the ‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame.’  None teach the dependence of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this drunken Helot of genius.  His indifference to truth, his defiance of sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have doomed him to oblivion not wholly merited.  The critic, whose duty forces him to read through the Adone, will be left bewildered by the spectacle of such profuse wealth so wantonly squandered.[195] In spite of fatigue, in spite of disgust, he will probably be constrained to record his opinion that, while Tasso represented the last effort of noble poetry struggling after modern expression under out-worn forms of the Classical Revival, it was left for Marino in his levity and license to evoke a real and novel though rococo form, which nicely corresponded to the temper of his times, and determined the immediate future of art.  For this reason he requires the attention which has here been paid him.