Therefore Marino, who is certainly not more euphuistic than Shakespeare, but who has immeasurably less of potent stuff in him, wears the motley of his barocco style in limbo bordering upon oblivion, while the Swan of Avon parades the same literary livery upon both summits of Parnassus.

So true it is that poetry cannot be estimated apart from intellectual and moral contents.

Had Marino written: Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down: or: 'twould anger him To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle Of some strange nature, letting it there stand Till she had laid it and conjured it down: or: The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon The prick of noon: he would have furnished his accusers with far stronger diatribes against words of double meaning and licentious conceits than his own pages offer.

But since it was out of the fullness of world-wisdom that Shakespeare penned those phrases for Mercutio, and set them as pendants to the impassioned descants upon love and death which he poured from the lips of Romeo, they pass condoned and unperceived.
Only poverty of matter and insincerity of fancy damn in Marino those literary affectations which he held in common with a host of writers--with Gorgias, Aeschylus, Chaeremon, Philostratus, among Greeks; with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bembo, Aretino, Tasso, Guarini, among Italians; with Calderon and Cervantes, not to mention Gongora, among Spaniards; with the foremost French and English writers of the Renaissance; with all verbal artists in any age, who have sought unduly to refine upon their material of language.

In a word, Marino is not condemned by his so-called Marinism.