Allowing for Marino’s peculiar method, his Adone has the excellence of unity which was so highly prized by the poets of his age and nation.  Critics have maintained that the whole epic is but a development of the episode of Rinaldo in Armida’s garden.  But it is more than this.  It contains all the main ingredients of the Italian Romance, with the exception of chivalry and war.  There is a pastoral episode corresponding to that of Erminia among the shepherds, a magnificent enchantress in the manner of Alcina, an imprisonment of the hero which reminds us of Ruggiero in Atlante’s magic castle, a journey like Astolfo’s to the moon, a conflict between good and evil supernatural powers, a thread of allegory more or less apparent, a side glance at contemporary history; and these elements are so combined as to render the Adone one of the many poems in the long romantic tradition.  It differs mainly from its predecessors in the strict unity of subject, which subordinates each episode and each digression to the personal adventures of the heroine and hero; while the death and obsequies of Adonis afford a tragic close that is lacking to previous poems detached from the Carolingian cycle.  Contemporary writers praised it as a poem of peace.  But it is the poem of ignoble peace, of such peace as Italy enjoyed in servitude, when a nation of cicisbei had naught to occupy their energies but sensual pleasure.  Ingenious as Marino truly was in conducting his romance upon so vast a scheme through all its windings to one issue, we feel that the slender tale of a boy’s passion for the queen of courtesans and his metamorphosis into the scarlet windflower of the forest supplied no worthy motive for this intricate machinery.  The metaphor of an alum basket crystallized upon a petty frame of wire occurs to us when we contemplate its glittering ornaments, and reflect upon the poverty of the sustaining theme.  It might in fact stand for a symbol of the intellectual vacancy of the age which welcomed it with rapture, and of the society which formed a century of taste upon its pattern.

In another and higher literary quality the Adone represents that moment of Italian development.  A foreigner may hardly pass magisterial judgment on its diction.  Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best passages are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of Marinism has been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose.  Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that never fails.  The undulating, evenly on-flowing cantilena of his verbal music sustains the reader on a tide of song.  That element of poetry, which, as I have observed, was developed with remarkable success by Tasso in some parts of the Gerusalemme is the main strength of the Adone.  With Marino the Chant d’Amour never rises so high,