Sometimes his satire becomes malignant, as in the sonnet against the people of Pistoja, which breathes the spirit of Dantesque invective.

Sometimes the fierceness of it is turned against himself, as in the capitolo upon old age and its infirmities.

The grotesqueness of this lurid descant on senility and death is marked by something rather Teutonic than Italian, a "Danse Macabre" intensity of loathing; and it winds up with the bitter reflections, peculiar to him in his latest years, upon the vanity of art.

"My much-prized art, on which I relied and which brought me fame, has now reduced me to this.

I am poor and old, the slave of others.