Blest and there planted modest myrtles of mediocre immortality.  Yet this is not the truth.  On such a quest there was only failure or success.  He did not succeed.  His cold mincemeat from Diocean tables, tepid historic parallels, artificially concocted legends, could not create Greek poetry again beneath the ribs of death.  The age was destined to be saved by music.  License was its only liberty, as the Adone taught.  Unmusical Chiabrera, buckram’d up by old mythologies and sterling precepts, left its life untouched.  His antique virtues stood, like stucco gods and goddesses, on pedestals in garden groves, and moldered.  His Pindaric flights were such as a sparrow, gazing upward at a hawk, might venture on.  Those abrupt transitions, whereby he sought to simulate the lordly sprezzatura of the Theban eagle, ’soaring with supreme dominion in the azure depths of air,’ remind us mainly of the hoppings of a frog.  Chiabrera failed:  failed all the more lamentably because he was so scholarly, so estimable.  He is chiefly interesting now as the example of a man devoted to the Church, a pupil of Jesuits, a moralist, and a humanist, in some sense also a patriot, who felt the temper of his time, and strove to innovate in literature.  Devoid of sincere sympathy with his academically chosen models, thinking he had discovered a safe path for innovation, he fell flat in the slime and perished.

Marino had human life and vulgar nature, the sensualities and frivolities of the century, to help him.  Chiabrera claimed none of these advantages.  What had Tassoni for his outfit?  Sound common sense, critical acumen, the irony of humor, hatred of tyrants and humbug, an acrid temper mollified by genial love of letters, a manly spirit of independence.  Last, but not least, he inherited something of the old Elysian smile which played upon the lips of Ariosto, from which Tasso’s melancholy shrank discomfited, which Marino smothered in the kisses of his courtesans, and Chiabrera banned as too ignoble for Dircean bards.  This smile it was that cheered Tassoni’s leisure when, fallen on evil days, he penned the Socchia Rapita.

Alessandro Tassoni was born in 1565 of a noble Modenese family.  Before completing his nineteenth year he won the degree of Doctor of Laws, and afterwards spent twelve years in studying at the chief universities of Lombardy.  Between 1599 and 1603 he served the Cardinal Ascanio Colonna both in Spain and Rome, as secretary.  The insight he then gained into the working of Spanish despotism made him a relentless enemy of that already decadent monarchy.  When Carlo Emmanuele, Duke of Savoy, sent back his Collar of the Golden Fleece in 1613 and drew the sword of resistance against Philip III., Tassoni penned two philippics against Spaniards, which are the firmest, most embittered expression of patriotism as it then existed.  He had the acuteness to perceive that the Spanish state was no longer in its prime of vigor,