Few writers, at the same time, illustrate the vices of decadence more luminously than this Protean poet of vacuity.

Few display more clearly the 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame.' None teach the dependence of art upon moralized and humane motives more significantly than this drunken Helot of genius.

His indifference to truth, his defiance of sobriety, his conviction that the sole end of art is astonishment, have doomed him to oblivion not wholly merited.

The critic, whose duty forces him to read through the _Adone_, will be left bewildered by the spectacle of such profuse wealth so wantonly squandered.[195] In spite of fatigue, in spite of disgust, he will probably be constrained to record his opinion that, while Tasso represented the last effort of noble poetry struggling after modern expression under out-worn forms of the Classical Revival, it was left for Marino in his levity and license to evoke a real and novel though _rococo_ form, which nicely corresponded to the temper of his times, and determined the immediate future of art.

For this reason he requires the attention which has here been paid him.
[Footnote 195: In support of this opinion upon Marino's merit as a poet, I will cite the episode of Clizio (canto i.p.