And so forth through eighty lines in which every conceivable change is rung upon Amo o non amo?...  Io vivo e moro pur....  Io non ho core e lo mio cor n’ha dui....  With all this effort no one is convinced of Falserina’s emotion, and her long-winded oration reads like a schoolboy’s exercise upon some line of the fourth Aeneid.  Yet if we allow the sense of rhythmical melody to intervene between our intellectual perception and Marino’s language, we shall still be able to translate these outpourings into something which upon the operatic stage would keep its value.  False rhetoric and the inability to stop when enough and more than enough has been said upon any theme to be developed, are the incurable defects of Marino.  His profuse fioriture_ compared with the simpler descant of Ariosto or Tasso remind us of Rossini’s florid roulades beside the grace of Pergolese’s or the majesty of Marcello’s song.

The peculiar quality of bad taste which is known in Italy as Marinismo, consisted in a perpetual straining after effect by antitheses, conceits, plans on words degenerating into equivocation, and such-like rhetorical grimaces.  Marino’s ars poetica was summed up in this sentence:  ‘Chi non sa far stupir, vada alia striglia.’  Therefore, he finds periphrases for the simplest expressions.  He calls the nightingale sirena de’boschi, gunpowder l’irreparabil fulmine terreno, Columbus il ligure Argonauta, Galileo il novello Endimione.  In these instances, what might have been expanded into a simile, is substituted for the proper word in order to surprise the reader.  When he alludes to Dante, he poses a conundrum on that poet’s surname:  Ben sull’ali liggier tre mondi canta.  The younger Palma is complimented on wresting the palm from Titian and Veronese.  Guido Reni is apostrophized as:  Reni onde il maggior Reno all’altro cede[197] We are never safe in reading his pages from the whirr and whistle of such verbal fireworks.  And yet it must be allowed that Marino’s style is on the whole freer from literary affectations than that of our own Euphuists.  It is only at intervals that the temptation to make a point by clever trickery seems irresistible.  When he is seriously engaged upon a topic that stirs his nature to the depth, as in the eighth canto, description flows on for stanza after stanza with limpid swiftness.  Another kind of artifice to which he has resort, is the repetition of a dominant word: 

[Footnote 197:  There is a streamlet called Reno near Bologna.]

    Con tai lusinghe il lusinghiero amante
    La lusinghiera Dea lusinga e prega.

* * * * *

    Godiamci, amiamei.  Amor d’amor mercede,
    Degno cambio d’amore e solo amore.

This play on a word sometimes passes over into a palpable pun, as in the following pretty phrase: 

    O mia dorata ed adorata Dea.