nates, and many of the sarcasms are really profound. A more biting irony on the wretched dissensions which had been the ruin of Italy cannot be conceived; and, notwithstanding a subordinate purpose of deriding Tasso's languid imitators, and the personal quarrel which prompted composition in the first instance, such was probably the main purpose of the writer, in his political sentiments and aspirations a statesman of the type of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who burned with hatred of the Spanish oppressor, but, except for the two Philippics he composed in demonstration of the real hollowness of the Spanish power, could find no other vent for his patriotism than his poetry, and wasted his life in the service of petty princes. La Secchia Rapita (The Rape of the Bucket) was published under a pseudonym at Paris in 1622, having long circulated in manuscript. Tassoni also showed himself a bold if bilious critic of Petrarch, against whose predominance a reaction was declaring itself, and participated in the general anti-Aristotelian movement of his times by a volume of miscellaneous reflections.
A contemporary of Tassoni is usually named along with him as a master of the heroi-comic style, but is in every respect greatly his inferior. This is Francesco Bracciolini (1566–1645), whose pen, if he really meant to serve the Church by ridiculing the classical mythology, should have been wielded a century sooner. Part of the humour of his Scherno degli Dei consists in the unconscious anachronism. It manifests considerable fertility of invention, and has survived the author's four epics, placed as these were immediately after Tasso's by good judges in his own day. The Malmantile Racquistato of Lorenzo Lippi the painter, the delight
