It is only intensity of feeling which prevents such lines as: Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call: All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more: from being Marinistic.

But it must be added that this intensity of feeling renders the artifice employed sublimely natural.

Here we lay our finger on the crucial point at issue in any estimate of literary mannerism.

What is the force of thought, the fervor of emotion, the acute perception of truth in nature and in man, which lies behind that manneristic screen?
If, as in the case of Shakespeare, sufficiency or superabundance of these essential elements is palpable, we pardon, we ignore, the euphuism.

But should the quality of substance fail, then we repudiate it and despise it.