A banner waving to the wind announced the advent of 'that ocean of incomparable learning, soul of lyres, subject for pens, material for ink, most eloquent, most fertile, phoenix of felicity, ornament of the laurel, of swans in their divine leisure chief and uncontested leader.' At Naples he died in 1625--felicitous in not having survived the fame which attended him through life and reached its climax just before his death.
[Footnote 187: It is worth noting that Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ was first printed in 1593, thirty years previously.] The _Adone_ strikes us at first sight as the supreme poem of epicene voluptuousness.

Its smooth-chinned hero, beautiful as a girl, soft as a girl, sentimental as a girl, with nothing of the man about him--except that 'Nature, as she wrought him, fell adoting,'-- threads a labyrinth of suggestive adventures, in each of which he is more the patient than the agent of desire.

Mercury introduces him to our attention in a series of those fables (tales of Narcissus, Ganymede, Cyparissus, Hylas, Atys) by which antiquity figured the seductiveness of adolescence.

Venus woos him, and Falserina tries to force him.

Captured in feminine attire by brigands, he is detained in a cave as the mistress of their chief, and doted on by the effeminate companion of his prison.