INTRODUCTION
example of his success—to achieve rhetorical vigour, but for the most part his poems are damned by their verbose exuberance, their tortured circumlocutions, their utter lack of simplicity and a sense of the real. Filicaia was more successful in breaking free from the bonds of garish ornament, but he, too, has a fatal fluency; all his rhetorical thunder is apt to fail suddenly—to change into the feeblest kind of falsetto; he ‘cracks a weak voice on too lofty a note’. Even in the vigorous, though slightly forced canzone which has a place in this volume he breaks off to address the ‘vero Giove’ in this strain:—
Che s'egli è pur destino,
E ne' volumi eterni ha scritto il fato,
Che deggia un dì all'Eusino
Servir l'ibera e l'alemanna Teti
E 'l suol cui parte l'Appenin gelato,
A' tuoi santi decreti
Pien di timore e d'umiltà m'inchino.
Vinca, se così vuoi,
Vinca lo Scita, e 'l glorioso sangue
Versi l'Europa esangue
Da ben mille ferite. I voler tuoi
Legge son ferma a noi:
Tu sol se' buono e giusto...
From the point of view of piety, of course, such a sentiment is admirable, but it is perhaps slightly inappropriate to a patriotic poem. No doubt it pleased the Jesuits; it is in their best manner. Filicaia's sonnets are far finer than his attempts in larger forms, though many of them are marred by his irritating habit of asking half a dozen rhetorical questions in as many lines.
