All the pathos, all the attraction of beauty and of sentiment, is reserved for the adolescent male.
This fact, though disagreeable, has to be noted.

It is too characteristic of the wave of feeling at that time passing over Europe, to be ignored.

The morbid strain which touched the Courts alike of Valois, Medici and Stuarts; which infected the poetry of Marlowe and of Shakespeare; which cast a sickly pallor even over sainthood and over painting in the school of Bologna, cannot be neglected.

In Marino's _Adone_ it reaches its artistic climax.[188] This, however, is not the main point about the poem.

The _Adone_ should rather be classed as the epic of voluptuousness in all its forms and species.