made a parody of that which still existed mainly as the unaccomplished hope of literature.  Trissino with his Italia Liberata, Tasso with his Gerusalemme Liberata, tried to persuade themselves and the world that they had succeeded in delivering Italy in labor of an epic.  But their maieutic ingenuity was vain.  The nation carried no epic in her womb.  Trissino’s Italia was a weazened changeling of erudition, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme a florid bastard of romance.  Tassoni, noticing the imposition of these two eminent and worthy writers, determined to give his century an epic or heroic poem in the only form which then was possible.  Briefly, he produced a caricature, modeled upon no existing work of modern art, but corresponding to the lineaments of that Desired of the Nation which pedants had prophesied.  Unity of action celestial machinery, races in conflict, contrasted heroes, the wavering chance of war, episodes, bards, heroines, and love subordinated to the martial motive—­all these features of the epic he viewed through the distorting medium of his comic art.

In the days of the second Lombard League, when Frederick II. was fighting a losing battle with the Church, Guelf Bologna came into grim conflict with her Ghibelline neighbor Modena.  The territory of these two cities formed the champ clos of a duel in which the forces of Germany and nearly all Italy took part; and in one engagement, at Fossalta, the Emperor’s heir, King Enzo of Sardinia, was taken captive.  How he passed the rest of his days, a prisoner of the Bolognese, and how he begat the semi-royal brood of Bentivogli, is matter of history and legend.  During this conflict memorable among the many municipal wars of Italy in the middle ages, it happened that some Modenese soldiers, who had pushed their way into the suburbs of Bologna, carried off a bucket and suspended it as a trophy in the bell-tower of the cathedral, where it may still be seen.  One of the peculiarities of those mediaeval struggles which roused the rivalry of towns separated from each other by a few miles of fertile country, and which raged through generations till the real interests at issue were confounded in blind animosity of neighbor against neighbor—­was the sense of humor and of sarcasm they encouraged.  To hurl dead donkey against your enemy’s town-wall passed for a good joke, and discredited his honor more than the loss of a hundred fighting men in a pitched battle.  Frontier fortresses received insulting names, like the Perugian Becca di questo, or like the Bolognese Grevalcore.  There was much, in fact, in these Italian wars which reminds one of the hostilities between rival houses in a public school.

Such being the element of humor ready to hand in the annals of his country, Tassoni chose the episode of the Bolognese bucket for the theme of a mock-heroic epic.  He made what had been an insignificant incident the real occasion of the war, and grouped the facts of history around it by ingenious distortions of the truth.  The bucket is the Helen of his Iliad:[200]