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.