His true stigma is the inadequacy to conceive of human nature except under a twofold mask of sensuous voluptuousness and sensuous ferocity.

It is this narrow and ignoble range of imagination which constitutes his real inferiority, far more than any poetical extravagance in diction.

The same mean conception of humanity brands with ignominy the four generations over which he dominated--that brood of eunuchs and courtiers, churchmen and _Cavalieri serventi_, barocco architects and brigands, casuists and bravi, grimacers, hypocrites, confessors, impostors, bastards of the spirit, who controlled Italian culture for a hundred years.
At a first glance we shall be astonished to find that this poet, who may justly be regarded as the corypheus of Circean orgies in the seventeenth century, left in MS.

a grave lament upon the woes of Italy.

Marino's _Pianto d'Italia_ has no trace of Marinism.