Yet while Tassoni drew blood, he never ceased to smile; and Count Culagna remains for us a personage of comedy rather than of satire.
[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.