Still we feel that Shakespeare was guilty of precisely the same verbal impertinences.  It is only intensity of feeling which prevents such lines as: 

    Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all;
    What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? 
    No love, my love, that thou may’st true love call: 
    All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more: 

from being Marinistic.  But it must be added that this intensity of feeling renders the artifice employed sublimely natural.  Here we lay our finger on the crucial point at issue in any estimate of literary mannerism.  What is the force of thought, the fervor of emotion, the acute perception of truth in nature and in man, which lies behind that manneristic screen?  If, as in the case of Shakespeare, sufficiency or superabundance of these essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we ignore, the euphuism.  But should the quality of substance fail, then we repudiate it and despise it.  Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery upon both summits of Parnassus.  So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents.  Had Marino written: 

    Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down: 

or: 

      ’twould anger him
    To raise a spirit in his mistress’ circle
    Of some strange nature, letting it there stand
    Till she had laid it and conjured it down: 

or: 

    The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon
    The prick of noon: 

he would have furnished his accusers with far stronger diatribes against words of double meaning and licentious conceits than his own pages offer.  But since it was out of the fullness of world-wisdom that Shakespeare penned those phrases for Mercutio, and set them as pendants to the impassioned descants upon love and death which he poured from the lips of Romeo, they pass condoned and unperceived.

Only poverty of matter and insincerity of fancy damn in Marino those literary affectations which he held in common with a host of writers—­with Gorgias, Aeschylus, Chaeremon, Philostratus, among Greeks; with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, Aretino, Tasso, Guarini, among Italians; with Calderon and Cervantes, not to mention Gongora, among Spaniards; with the foremost French and English writers of the Renaissance; with all verbal artists in any age, who have sought unduly to refine upon their material of language.  In a word, Marino is not condemned by his so-called Marinism.  His true stigma is the inadequacy to conceive of human nature except under a twofold mask of sensuous voluptuousness and sensuous ferocity.  It is this narrow and ignoble range of imagination which constitutes his real inferiority, far more than any poetical extravagance in diction.  The same mean conception of humanity brands with ignominy the four generations over which he dominated—­that brood of eunuchs and courtiers, churchmen and Cavalieri serventi, barocco architects and brigands, casuists and bravi, grimacers, hypocrites, confessors, impostors, bastards of the spirit, who controlled Italian culture for a hundred years.