Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And in the course of a few days after this inauspicious interview with his new patron, he entered on the duties of his office; but he awaited in vain the expected summons to the promised audience. At length the duke honestly and honourably acknowledged, that his reserve was owing to some private information he had received to his disadvantage. This proved to be really the case; for Tassoni discovered that some of his enemies had been secretly doing him ill offices with the duke. which delicacy forbids me to take any further notice. Descriptions, which would sully the page of history, may not only be endured, but pardoned, in a burlesque poem. Accordingly we do not consider as misplaced in the Trivia of Gay, booh ii. /. 297? 300, an incident somewhat similar to the one which I have excluded from the text.?Having noticed the Trivia, I shall take this occasion to observe, that it is one of the burlesque poems which may be said to have emanated from La Secchia Rapita. It is, howeverl a mock-heroic of a peculiar kind; it is a didactic poem, ?-a poem
in the plan and execution of which, as Dr. Aikin justly observes,
Gay has undoubtedly the claim of an in-
venter. Lett, on a Course of Eng. Poet. p. 53. Tassoni had reason to rejoice, that, in consequence of the machinations of the secretaries, he had only to endure the frowns, and not, iike Marino, to suffer from the wrath of the duke. Amongst the many interesting incidents in the eventful life of Mariuo, we find that Murtola, one of the secretaries of the court, whose life had been recently spared at the requisition of Marino, basely, unjustly, and ungenerously accused him of slandering the duke in his juvenile poein entitled La Cuccagni, and succeeded, K
The secretaries of the court, says Muratori,
beheld, with an …