the Cowleys and Crashaws of Charles the First's time; but he is physical, while they are metaphysical; his conceits are less far-fetched and ingenious than theirs, and few of them either could or would have produced his licentious, but, in an artistic point of view, admirable Pastorella. Marini's influence on the contemporary poetry of his own country was very great; but the two or three men of genius remained unaffected by him, and the names of his multitudinous imitators are not worth preserving. His life, though chequered by scrapes and quarrels, was on the whole prosperous, and the patronage of the French court made him independent of the petty princes of Italy. He had bitter enemies in Gasparo Murtola, a poet who would be forgotten but for his and Marini's mutual lampoons, and Tommaso Stigliani, a more considerable personage, who had enjoyed the great honour of being run through the body by the historian Davila, and whose early promise had drawn a sonnet from Tasso, remarkable for the hint it affords that Tasso himself had projected an epic upon Columbus:
"Thy song Orphean, able to placate
The Stygian thrones, and wailing shades appease,
Stiglian, doth so upon my spirit seize,
Mine own in its compare I humbly rate.
And if like Autumn with thy April mate
As promised by such harbingers as these,
Thou'lt pass the pillared bounds of Hercules,
And safe to utmost Thule navigate.
Now, parted from the crowds intrepid go,
Scaling steep Helicon, thy high desire,
No more in dread to wander to and fro.
There swaying from a cypress hangs my lyre;
Salute it in my name, and bid it know
That Time and Fortune for my ill conspire."
