Marino avowed that he only aimed at surprising his readers: E del poeta il fin la meraviglia.
[Footnote 194: See the climax to the episode of Filauro and Filora.] But 45,000 lines of sustained astonishment, of industrious and indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of _capricci_ and _concetti_, induce the stolidity of callousness.

We leave off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness.

For, with all his faults, Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of fascination.

The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different from the pictorial and the poetical, was a quality of the seventeenth century corresponding to its defects of bad taste.

And this gift no poet shared in larger measure than Marino.
Granted his own conditions, granted the emptiness of moral and intellectual substance in the man and in his age, we are compelled to acknowledge that his literary powers were rich and various.