[181] Guarini may be compared with Trissino in these points of his private life. See Renaissance in Italy, vol. v. 303-305.
[182] Lettere, p. 196.
[183] Il Pastor Fido, per cura di G. Casella (Firenze, Barbéra, 1866), p. liv.
[184] I might have further illustrated this point by quoting the thirty-five lines in which Titiro compares a maiden to the rose which fades upon the spray after the fervors of the noon have robbed its freshness (act i. sc. 4). To contest the beauty of the comparison would be impossible. Yet when we turn to the two passages in Ariosto (Orl. Fur. i. 42, 43, and xxiv. 80) on which it has been modeled, we shall perceive how much Guarini lost in force by not writing with his eye upon the object or with the authenticity of inward vision, but with a self-conscious effort to improve by artifices and refinements upon something he has read. See my essay on 'The Pathos of the Rose in Time,' April, 1886.
[185] Even Silvio, the most masculine of the young men, whose heart is closed to love, appears before us thus:
Oh Silvio, Silvio! a che ti die Natura
Ne' più begli anni tuoi
Fior di beltà si delicato e vago,
Se tu se' tanto a calpestarlo intento?
Che s'avess'io cotesta tua sì bella
E sì fiorita guancia,
Addio selve, direi:
E seguendo altre fere,
E la vita passando in festa e'n gioco,
Farei la state all'ombra, e 'l verno al foco.
[186] Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, Salvator Rosa, Vico, were, like Marino, natives of the Regno.
[187] It is worth noting that Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis was first printed in 1593, thirty years previously.
[188] Ferrari, in his Rivolnzioni d'Italia, vol. iii. p. 563, observes: 'Una Venere sospetta versa lagrime forse maschili sul bellissimo Adonide,' etc. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, in like manner, is so written as to force the reader to feel with Venus the seduction of Adonis.
[189] With the stanza quoted above Marino closes the cycle which Boccaccio in the Amoroso Visione (canto xlix.) had opened.