[Footnote 201:  Canto xii. 77.]

[Footnote 202:  So Heine wrote of Aristophanes.  See my essay in Studies of the Greek Poets.]

In the next place, Tassoni meant to ridicule the poets of his time.  He calls the Secchia Rapita ’an absurd caprice, written to burlesque the modern poets.’  His genius was nothing if not critical, and literature afforded him plenty of material for fun.  Romance-writers with their jousts and duels and armed heroines, would-be epic poets with their extra-mundane machinery and pomp of phrase, Marino and his hyperbolical conceits, Tuscan purists bent on using only words of the Tre Cento, Petrarchisti spinning cobwebs of old metaphors and obsolete periphrases, all felt in turn the touch of his light lash.  The homage paid to Petrarch’s stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule.  There is not a city of Italy which Tassoni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit.  The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the satirist vulgar phrases when he quits the grand style and, taking Virgil’s golden trumpet from his lips, slides off into a canaille drawl or sluice of Billingsgate.  Modena is burlesqued in her presiding Potta, gibbeted for her filthy streets.  The Sienese discover that the world accounts them lunatics.  The Florentines and Perugians are branded for notorious vice.  Roman foppery, fantastical in feminine pretentiousness, serves as a foil to drag Culagna down into the ditch of ignominy.  Here and there, Tassoni’s satire is both venomous and pungent, as when he paints the dotage of the Empire, stabs Spanish pride of sovereignty, and menaces the Papacy with insurrection.  But for the most part, like Horace in the phrase of Persius, he plays about the vitals of the victims who admit him to their confidence—­admissus circum praecordia ludit.

[Footnote 203:  Canto viii. 33, 34.]

We can but regret that so clear-sighted, so urbane and so truly Aristophanic a satirist had not a wider field to work in.  Seventeenth-century Italy was all too narrow for his genius; and if the Secchia Rapita has lost its savor, this is less the poet’s fault than the defect of his material.  He was strong enough to have brought the Athens of Cleon, the France of Henri III., or the England of James I. within the range of his distorting truth-revealing mirror.  Yet, even as it was, Tassoni opened several paths for modern humorists.  Rabelais might have owned that caricature of Mars and Bacchus rioting in a tavern bed with Venus travestied as a boy, and in the morning, after breakfasting divinely on two hundred restorative eggs, escaping with the fear of a scandalized host and the police-court before their eyes.  Yet Rabelais would hardly have brought this cynical picture of crude debauchery into so fine a contrast with the celestial environment of gods and goddesses.  True to his principle of effect by alternation, Tassoni