This antithesis between sustained poetry and melodiously-worded slang, between radiant forms of beauty and grotesque ugliness, penetrates the Secchia Rapita in every canto and in every detail. We pass from battle-scenes worthy of Ariosto and Tasso at their best into ditches of liquid dung. Ambassadors are introduced with touches that degrade them to the rank of commis voyageurs. Before the senate the same men utter orations in the style of Livy. The pomp of war is paraded, its machinery of catapults is put in motion, to discharge a dead ass into a besieged town; and when the beleagured garrison behold it flying through the air, they do not take the donkey for a taunt, but for a heavenly portent. A tournament is held and very brave in their attire are all the combatants. But according to its rules the greatest sluggard wins the crown of honor. Even in the similes, which formed so important an element of epic decoration, the same principle of contrast is maintained. Fine vignettes from nature in the style consecrated by Ariosto and Tasso introduce ludicrous incidents. Vulgar details picked up from the streets prepare us for touches of pathos or poetry.

Tassoni takes high rank as a literary artist for the firmness with which he adhered to his principle of irony, and for the facility of vigor which conceals all traces of effort in so difficult a task. I may be thought to have pitched his praise too high. But those will forgive me who enjoy the play of pure sharp-witted fancy, or who reflect upon the sadness of the theme which occupies my pen in these two volumes.

Of the four poets to whom this chapter is devoted, Guarini, Marino, and Tassoni were successful, Chiabrera was a respectable failure. The reason of this difference is apparent. In the then conditions of Italian society, at the close of a great and glorious period of varied culture, beneath the shadow of a score of Spaniardizing princelings, with the spies of the Inquisition at every corner, and the drill of the Tridentine Council to be gone through under Jesuitical direction, there was no place for a second Pindar. But there was scope for decorative art, for sensuous indulgence, and for genial irony. Happy the man who paced his vineyards, dreaming musically of Arcadia! Happy the man who rolled in Circe's pigsty! Happy the man who sat in his study and laughed! Therefore the most meritorious productions of the time, Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnaso, Bracciolini's Scherno degli Dei, have a touch of Tassoni's humor in them; while Achillini and Preti limp somewhat feebly after Marino's Alcibidean swagger, and endless pastorals pullulate from Guarini's tragi-comedy. We need not occupy our minds with these secondary writers, nor do more than indicate the scholarly niceness with which Filicaja in the second half of the seventeenth century continued Chiabrera's tradition. But one word must be said in honor of Fulvio Testi, the Modenese poet and statesman, who paid for the fame of a Canzone with his head. He has a double interest for us: first, because Leopardi esteemed him the noblest of Italian lyrists after Petrarch; secondly, because his fate proved that Tasso's dread of assassination was not wholly an illusion. Reading the ode addressed to Count Raimondo Montecuccoli, Ruscelletto orgoglioso, the ode which brought Testi to the block in a dungeon of the Estensi, we comprehend what Leopardi meant by his high panegyric. It is a piece of poetry, lofty in style, grave in movement, pregnant with weighty thought, stern and rugged, steeped in a sublimity of gloom and Stoicism which remind us of the author of La Ginestra. The century produced little that bore a stamp so evident of dignity and greatness.