CHAPTER XI.
GUARINO, MARINO, CHIABRERA, TASSONI.
Dearth of Great Men--Guarini a Link between Tasso and the Seventeenth Century--His Biography--The _Pastor Fido_--Qualities of Guarini as Poet--Marino the Dictator of Letters--His Riotous Youth at Naples--Life at Rome, Turin, Paris--Publishes the _Adone_--The Epic of Voluptuousness--Character and Action of Adonis--Marino's Hypocrisy--Sentimental Sweetness--Brutal Violence--Violation of Artistic Taste--Great Powers of the Poet--Structure of the _Adone_--Musical Fluency--Marinism--Marino's Patriotic Verses--Contrast between Chiabrera and Marino--An Aspirant after Pindar--Chiabrera's Biography--His Court Life--Efforts of Poets in the Seventeenth Century to attain to Novelty--Chiabrera's Failure--Tassoni's Life--His Thirst to Innovate--Origin of the _Secchia Rapita_--Mock-Heroic Poetry--The Plot of this Poem--Its Peculiar Humor--Irony and Satire--Novelty of the Species--Lyrical Interbreathings--Sustained Contrast of Parody and Pathos--The Poet Testi.
Soon after 1600 it became manifest that lapse of years and ecclesiastical intolerance had rendered Italy nearly destitute of great men.

Her famous sons were all either dead, murdered or exiled; reduced to silence by the scythe of time or by the Roman 'arguments of sword and halter.' Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnesecchi burned, Paleario burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished, after a quarter of a century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe.

Tasso, worn out with misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan; Sarpi survived the stylus of the Roman Curia with calm inscrutability at S.Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch-tower behind Bello Sguardo.

With Michelangelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto in 1594, the godlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions?
The list is but a poor one.

Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarroti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in literature.