In their main contention Cinthio and Pigna were no doubt right, and much in advance of their time. [Sidenote: _On Drama._] The reply of Minturno that Poetry may adapt itself to the times, but cannot depart from its own fundamental laws, is clearly a _petitio principii_. In his less important _Discorso_ on the Drama Cinthio is hardly at all rebel to Aristotle—indeed it is very important to observe that even in the Romance Essay he has none of the partisan and somewhat illiberal anti-Peripateticism which we find later in Bruno and others. There he goes on the solid ground that Aristotle did not know the Kind for which he does not account—that he was no more blamable than, as we may say, supposing that he had given a definition of mammalia which excluded the kangaroo. In the Drama Cinthio had not been brought face to face with any similarly new facts. Italian tragedy, his own included, was scrupulously Senecan, if not quite scrupulously Aristotelian, in general lines. Italian comedy followed Plautus and Terence only too closely; and though Cinthio’s lines of criticism (strengthened by the Ciceronian-Donatist theory of the _speculum vitæ_) led him, like Il Lasca and others, to insist on the different circumstances of Italian literature here also, they necessitated no new lawmaking as in the case of the _Romanzi_. Both _Discorsi_ are full of ingenious _aperçus_, sometimes followed out—sometimes not. [Sidenote: _Some points in both._] For instance, when Cinthio (i. 24) cites his three examples of writers who have treated their heroes from childhood upwards contrary to the Aristotelian principles, he instances Xenophon in the _Cyropædia_ as well as Statius and Silius Italicus. The instance does not in his expressed remarks, but it might very well in his own or others’ thoughts, lead to the consideration that whether verse is or is not essential to poetry, it is certainly _not_ essential to Romance—with all the momentous and far-reaching consequences of that discovery. Again he seems (i. 82) to have appreciated, with a taste and sense rare in his age, the impropriety of mixing up Christian and Pagan mythology. And the same taste and sense appear, as a rule, in the minuter remarks (p. 100 _sq._) on verse and phrase, and even on those minutest points not merely of verbal but of literal criticism which the Italians, more sensible than some modern critics, never despised, though they may sometimes have gone to the other extreme. In fact, the last half, and rather more, of the _Discorso_ is not so much concerned with the Romances as with poetic diction and arrangement in general, or even with these matters as concerns literature both in prose and in verse.