The sensual refinement proper to an age of social decadence found in it exact expression, and it became the code of gallantry for the next two centuries.
[Footnote 185: Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose heart is closed to love, appears before us thus: Oh Silvio, Silvio! a che ti die Natura Ne' piu begli anni tuoi Fior di belta si delicato e vago, Se tu se' tanto a calpestarlo intento?
Che s'avess'io cotesta tua si bella E si fiorita guancia, Addio selve, direi: E seguendo altre fere, E la vita passando in festa e'n gioco, Farei la state all'ombra, e 'l verno al foco.
] Meanwhile the literary dictator of the seventeenth century was undoubtedly Marino.

On him devolved the scepter which Petrarch bequeathed to Politian, Politian to Bembo, and Bembo to Torquato Tasso.
In natural gifts he was no unworthy successor of these poets, though the gifts he shared with them were conspicuously employed by him for purposes below the scope of any of his predecessors.

In artistic achievement he concentrated the less admirable qualities of all, and brought the Italian poetry of the Renaissance to a close by exaggerating its previous defects.

Yet, as a man, Marino is interesting, more interesting in many respects than the melancholy discontented Tasso.

He accepted the conditions of his age with genial and careless sympathy, making himself at once its idol, its interpreter, and its buffoon.
Finally, he illustrates the law of change which transferred to Neapolitans in this age the scepter which had formerly been swayed by Tuscans and Lombards.[186] Giovanni Battista Marino was born at Naples in 1569.