As a writer, Tassoni, in common with the best spirits of his time, aimed at innovation.  It had become palpable to the Italians that the Renaissance was over, and that they must break with the traditions of the past.  This, as I have already pointed out, was the saving virtue of the early seventeenth century; but what good fruits it might have fostered, had not the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the age been adverse, remains a matter for conjecture.  ’It is my will and object to utter new opinions,’ he wrote to a friend; and acting upon this principle, he attacked the chief prejudices of his age in philosophy and literature.  One of his earliest publications was a miscellaneous collection of Divers Thoughts, in which he derided Aristotle’s Physics and propounded speculations similar to those developed by Gassendi.  He dared to cast scorn on Homer, as rude and barbarous, poor in the faculty of invention, taxable with at least five hundred flagrant defects.  How little Tassoni really comprehended Homer may be judged from his complacent assertion that the episode of Luna and Endymion (Secchia Rapita, canto viii.) was composed in the Homeric manner.  In truth he could estimate the Iliad and Odyssey no better than Chiabrera could the Pythians and Olympians of Pindar.  A just sense of criticism failed the scholars of that age, which was too remote in its customs, too imperfect in its science of history, to understand the essence of Greek art.  With equally amusing candor Tassoni passed judgments upon Dante, and thought that he had rivaled the Purgatory in his description of the Dawn (Secchia Rapita, viii. 15, the author’s note).  We must, however, be circumspect and take these criticisms with a grain of salt; for one never knows how far Tassoni may be laughing in his sleeve.  There is no doubt, however, regarding the sincerity of his strictures upon the Della Cruscan Vocabulary of 1612, or the more famous inquiry into Petrarch’s style.  The Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca were composed in 1602-3 during a sea voyage from Genoa to Spain.  They told what now must be considered the plain truth of common sense about the affectations into which a servile study of the Canzoniere had betrayed generations of Italian rhymesters.  Tassoni had in view Petrarch’s pedantic imitators rather than their master; and when the storm of literary fury, stirred up by his work, was raging round him, he thus established his position:  ’Surely it is allowable to censure Petrarch’s poems, if a man does this, not from malignant envy, but from a wish to remove the superstitions and abuses which beget such evil effects, and to confound the sects of the Rabbins hardened in their perfidy of obsolete opinion, and in particular of such as think they cannot write straight without the falsariga of their model.’  I may observe in passing that the points in this paragraph are borrowed from a sympathizing letter which Marino addressed to the author on his essay.  In another place Tassoni stated, ’It was never my intention to speak evil of this poet [Petrarch], whom I have always admired above any lyrist of ancient or modern times.’