[Footnote 195:  In support of this opinion upon Marino’s merit as a poet, I will cite the episode of Clizio (canto i. p. 17); the tale of Psyche (iv. 65); the tale of the nightingale and the boy—­which occurs both in Ford and Crashaw, by the way (vii. 112); the hymn to pleasure (vii. 116); the passage of Venus and Adonis to the bath (viii. 133); the picture of the nymph and satyr (viii. 135); the personification of the Court (x. 167); the Cave of Jealousy (xii. 204-206); the jewel-garden of Falserina (xii. 218); Falserina watching Adonis asleep (xii. 225); Falserina’s incantations (xiii. 233); Mars in the lap of Venus surrounded by the loves (xiii. 245); Venus disguised as a gypsy (xv. 290); the game of chess (xv. 297); the leave-taking of Venus and Adonis (xvii. 332); the phantom of dead Adonis (xviii. 357); the grief of Venus (xviii. 358-362); the tales of Hyacinth and Pampinus (xix. 372-378).  The references are to ed.  Napoli, Boutteaux, 1861.]

But how, it may be asked, was it possible to expand the story of Venus and Adonis into an epic of 45,000 lines?  The answer to this question could best be given by an analysis of the twenty cantos:  and since few living students have perused them, such a display of erudition would be pardonable.  Marini does not, however, deserve so many pages in a work devoted to the close of the Italian Renaissance.  It will suffice to say that the slender narrative of the amour of Venus and her boyish idol, his coronation as king of Cyprus, and his death by the boar’s tusk, is ingeniously interwoven with a great variety of episodes.  The poet finds occasion to relate the principal myths of Hellenic passion treating these in a style which frequently reminds us of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; he borrows tales from Apuleius, Lucian, and the pastoral novelists; he develops the theme of jealousy in Mars and Vulcan, introduces his own autobiography, digresses into romantic adventures by sea and land, creates a rival to Venus in the sorceress Falserina, sketches the progress of poetry in one canto and devotes another to a panegyric of Italian princes, extols the House of France and adulates Marie de Medicis, surveys the science of the century, describes fantastic palaces and magic gardens, enters with curious minuteness into the several delights of the five senses, discourses upon Courts, ambition, avarice and honor, journeys over the Mediterranean, conducts a game of chess through fifty brilliant stanzas; in brief, while keeping his main theme in view, is careful to excite and sustain the attention of his readers by a succession of varied and ingeniously suggested novelties.  Prolixity, indefatigable straining after sensational effect, interminable description, are the defects of the Adone; but they are defects related to great qualities possessed by the author, to inexhaustible resources, curious knowledge, the improvisatore’s facility, the trained rhetorician’s dexterity in the use of language, the artist’s fervid delight in the exercise of his craft.