This, as I have already pointed out, was the saving virtue of the early seventeenth century; but what good fruits it might have fostered, had not the political and ecclesiastical conditions of the age been adverse, remains a matter for conjecture.

'It is my will and object to utter new opinions,' he wrote to a friend; and acting upon this principle, he attacked the chief prejudices of his age in philosophy and literature.

One of his earliest publications was a miscellaneous collection of _Divers Thoughts_, in which he derided Aristotle's Physics and propounded speculations similar to those developed by Gassendi.

He dared to cast scorn on Homer, as rude and barbarous, poor in the faculty of invention, taxable with at least five hundred flagrant defects.

How little Tassoni really comprehended Homer may be judged from his complacent assertion that the episode of Luna and Endymion (_Secchia Rapita_, canto viii.) was composed in the Homeric manner.