The singing faculty of the Neapolitan was given to this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova, an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always kept on singing.

His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and exploding popguns, which deafen and distract our ears attuned to the suave cadence of the _cantilena_, is no less characteristic of the Neapolitan.

Marino had the improvisatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial passion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his birthplace.

He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and contrast to pervading beauty.
[Footnote 196: There are passages of pure _cantilena_ in this poem, where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the mere vehicle for rhythmic melody.

Of this verbal music the dirge of the nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples (xix.pp.