"Comedy," says he,[138] "the personages of which are for the most part plebeian, or at least of private station, and the action of which is generally familiar and domestic in its character, is of its own nature low and trivial. And if it is not sustained by a certain elegance of style—which is all the more difficult to attain, in that it must be natural—and by an ingenious, and at the same time probable plot, abounding in movement and surprising turns, it altogether falls to earth; and it is almost impossible to endure either the representation or the perusal of it." The learned historian of Italian literature does not seem to have the remotest suspicion, that a large and deep knowledge of human nature, that the wide and penetrating observation of its similitudes and dissimilitudes, its contrasts, inconsistencies, and analogies, which supply wit with its material, and the genial power of sympathising with its thousand moods, which generates humour, may be either necessary or desirable to a comic writer. If Tiraboschi may be accepted as spokesman for his countrymen in this matter, we have an abundantly sufficient explanation of the small share, which the Muses of the sock and buskin have had in forming that portion of the national mind which takes its shape from the national literature, and to which their sisters of the Nine have notably contributed. But even comedy, though not in the same degree as tragedy, laboured under the additional disqualification inflicted on it by the prevailing mania for classical imitation. In this case the model worked from was Latin instead of Greek, and generally rather Plautus than Terence. An instance worthy of note may be cited in the "Sporta" or "Money–bag" of Giambattista Gelli, the celebrated Florentine shoemaker, who became Consul of the Academy of Florence. In the prologue to this comedy he urges, in excuse for all shortcomings, that "it is surely a wonder that he has accomplished so much, having all day long to ply scissors and needle, which, womanly tools though they be, were never, as far as his reading tells him, taken in hand by the Muses." Here we have a man of the people, from whom some original conceptions drawn from native popular life might have been expected. But the shoemaker was as classical as his superiors; and his "Sporta" is little more than a disguisement of Plautus in Florentine costume. Macchiavelli's well known comedy, the "Mandragola," is the most notable exception to what has been said of the plays of Isabella Andreini's day. A genuine type of character altogether belonging to his own time, and full of the elements of high comedy, was embodied in Frà Timoteo, the tartuffe monk, by the daring Secretary. But it is an exception, which but proves the rule.