Alessandro, who was born at Modena in 1565, and died in 1635, ranks as the best of those Italian writers who, in the seventeenth century, made the burlesque epic a remarkable branch of literature for their nation. His work of this class, "La Secchia Rapita," or the Rape of the Bucket, commemorates an incursion which, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the Modenese made into the town of Bologna, carrying off as a trophy the bucket of a public well. Much of the wit has perished with the remembrance of the persons satirized, and much more is too local to be relished or understood except in Italy; while the alternation of serious and lofty feeling with broad buffoonery, necessarily disgusts those who take their poetical creed from the hands of the French. But, in spite of Voltaire's contempt for the poem, it is one which must not be neglected by any systematic student of Italian literature. Another work equally characteristic is Tassoni's "Pensieri Diversi," a collection of ingenious and outrageous paradoxes, founded on a complete scepticism, real or pretended, as to the merits, not only of the great names in literature, but as to the uses of literature itself. A similar production, the "Considerazioni sopra il Petrarca," was an attack made, in the same spirit, upon the poetical idol of the author's countrymen.