shocked Vida and no doubt did shock Scaliger. The English dramatists acted on it; but hardly any others out of Spain, and most certainly not the Italian. For all its drawbacks this batch of plays is justly celebrated in the literary history of Europe: and though fortunately, in England at least, the Bibbiena. style of them met with little continued favour, yet in England as elsewhere they were received with the respectful and almost humble deference which was bestowed upon all Italian products of literature. More than one of them is familiar to all English readers of a tolerably studious kind, as matter for Shakespeare. For instance, Bibbiena's Calandra1 has some resemblances in the main incident of its plot (the resemblance of a brother and sister) to Twelfth Night, with something also to the Comedy of Errors. All of them possess brilliancy or force, or both, of one kind and another; most of them, Aretino's excepted, are literature; most of them, Aretino's perhaps most of all, draw upon genuine life. Aretino. But the fault of them, from the general and impartial view of literary dramatic criticism, is, that they do not possess life enough, and do not possess it in the right way or of the right kind. Very likely Aretino has given us quite a faithful portraitgallery of those associates of his, in tavern or brothel, whose society Berni branded on him in a famous 1 This, with the Clizia and Mandragola of Machiavelli, Aretino's Ipocrita, and Lorenzino de' Medici's Aridosio, will be found in vol. i. of Lemonnier's Teatro Ital. Antico, Florence, 1888. All Machiavelli's plays are in the collected edition above cited: all Ariosto's in the Opere Minori as above. capitolo: but then they are people about whom we do not want to know, and the author can tell us of no others. Even in the London of 1901 it is doubtful whether Machiavelli's Mandragola could be acted. The much and justly rebuked prologues and epilogues of Dryden are decent beside those of Ariosto to the Lena and the Suppositi. And this ugly feature is made uglier by the fact that though we cannot say that it was exactly false to the time, it was certainly intensified by mere corrupt following of the ancients. So that this following did harm in two ways-by supplying a vicious model, and by suggesting more vicious details and decorations. Ariosto- It is not fair to judge plays by titles; indeed, it may be said to have been part of the dramatic genius of our Elizabethan playwrights to give their plays titles from which as a rule nothing could be guessed. The Italians, still true to their classical models, were more downright. Calandra " is simply a proper name. The Cassaria, the Suppositi, the Lena, the Negromante, the Scolastica of Ariosto, for the most part tell their own story as much as L'Etourdi or Le Grondeur. Two of Machiavelli's comedies, or of the comedies attributed to him, have no titles at all, but are simply "A Comedy in Verse," "A Comedy in Prose." Of the others Clizia is the name of the heroine, Mandragola the name of the drug to which is assigned the peculiar virtue which is necessary to the action of the play. Of Aretino1 the 1 All these, with the tragedy Orazia, are in 1 vol. of Sanzogno's cheap collection (Milan, 1882). Cortegiana, the Ipocrita, the Filosofo are outspoken, if the Marescalco and the Tallanta are not. In all appears that curious notion of comedy which seems to have come in with the New Attic variety, General style of which accounts to some extent for the scorn their plays. of Aristotle (though in his time it had not yet triumphed), and which has cropped up again so repeatedly that it must be allowed a certain genuineness of character. It is absolutely necessary that somebody must be made a fool of: and the selection of the somebody is not determined by any considerations of poetical justice, nor the treatment of him governed by any scruples of decency and good feeling. Even Restoration Comedy is not unfrequently a good deal above the Mandragola and the unnamed Commedia in Prosa, while in this whole class of play we are at such a distance from As You Like It or the Merchant of Venice that it may seem almost profanation to mention them in connection. Types, and as a rule degraded types, of character; a few stock plots, in which the revolutions and discoveries are awkwardly provided by the substitution of Turk for Greek pirates; and the maintenance with little change of that impossible servant, whom Aristophanes would have regarded with as much scorn as Shakespeare, supply the plots. Expressed or suggested indecency gives the jokes. It is a style of drama to which the praise of cleverness may be generally granted, that of goodness seldom or never. Even the dialogue, which is not seldom witty, almost loses that quality when it is contrasted with Molière and Congreve; of the higher humour there is hardly a trace. This being so, it does not seem necessary to devote any great space even to the major examples, to the Grazzini, greater writers-still less to the minor, Cecchi, &c. Gelli and Cecchi, Firenzuola, Ambra, Il Lasca1-to see whether the phrases bestowed on their occasional scenes by historians can be sometimes approved, or the strictures allotted by the same historians to their art and their morals can ever be toned down. It is sufficient to be certain that here, as not unfrequently occurs in literature, the talent and the genius, not merely of an individual but of a considerable group of writers, were simply travelling on a road which led nowhither. Even if Ariosto with his own genius had had the ideas of Il Lasca, and had completely (he has in one or two plays more or less) shaken off the mere false imitation of the ancients, in order to take to the true mimesis of nature, it is not likely that much would have followed from it. Of the two springs of genuine modern drama, as has been shown above, Italy possessed the one in a scantily flowing rill, while the other was suited not to correct but to intensify the faults to which she was naturally inclined. England to a great extent, Spain to a less, France to some, Germany, when unkind fate 1 Of these, Cecchi's six comedies, La Dote, La Moglie, Gl' Incantesimi, La Stiava, I Dissimili, and L'Assiuolo, are in one volume of the Sanzogno collection (Milan, 1883); Gelli's La Sporta and Lo Errore, with his dialogues, in another (Milan, 1887); and Grazzini's comedies in one of Lemonnier's (Florence, 1897). would let her, were enabled to correct what was bad and develop what was good in the mediæval drama by the influence of the classics and their Humanist imitators. But Italy had next to no mediæval drama to be corrected by the classics, or to correct them, and so a copy of these classics themselves, with the faults exaggerated, as in all copies, and the virtues weakened, as in most, was all she could achieve. In the countries where drama was to be a literary kind with a real future—a condition which, as has The artificial been seen above, excludes Italy-something Latin play. besides Plautus, Terence, and Seneca on the one hand, and the medieval drama on the other, has to be taken into consideration. This is the artificial Humanist Latin play, both tragic, comic, and mixed, which was formed on the models of Plautus, of Terence, and of Seneca themselves. To most of us the tragedies of Buchanan and Muret, the comedies, or mystery-comedies, of Volder and Kirchmayer, are mainly, if not merely, curiosities in themselves, deserving higher rank than this only because of the light they throw on certain periods of the history of literature, and the influence which they had upon certain stages of literary development. These considerations will indeed, in the eyes of the catholic student of things literary, always save them from ignorant and one-sided contempt. But they can scarcely secure for them, from such students, much more than a respect of esteem. The value of the Jephthes and the Acolastus and the Pammachius in literature (the last named at least has |