The leading episode, which occupies about three cantos of the twelve, is an elaborate vilification of this personal enemy travestied as the contemptible Conte di Culagna.
Tassoni's method of art corresponds to the irony of his inspiration.

We find his originality in a peculiar blending of serious and burlesque styles, in abrupt but always well-contrived transitions from heroical magniloquence to plebeian farce and from scurrility to poetic elevation, finally in a frequent employment of the figure which the Greeks called [Greek: para prosdokian].

His poem is a parody of the Aristophanic type.
'Like a fantastically ironical magic tree, the world-subversive idea which lies at the root of it springs up with blooming ornament of thoughts, with singing nightingales and climbing chattering apes.'[202] To seek a central motive or a sober meaning in this caprice of the satirical imagination would be idle.

Tassoni had no intention, as some critics have pretended, to exhibit the folly of those party wars which tore the heart of Italy three centuries before his epoch, to teach the people of his day the miseries of foreign interference, or to strike a death-blow at classical mythology.

The lesson which can be drawn from his cantos, that man in warfare disquiets himself in vain for naught, that a bucket is as good a _casus belli_ as Helen, the moral which Southey pointed in his ballad of the Battle of Blenheim, emerges, not from the poet's design, but from the inevitable logic of his humor.
Pique inspired the _Secchia Rapita_, and in the despicable character of Count Culagna he fully revenged the slight which had been put upon him.
The revenge is savage, certainly; for the Count remains 'immortally immerded' in the long-drawn episode which brought to view the shame of his domestic life.