To speak correctly, Seneca prefers (_Agamemnon_, _Hercules Furens_, _H. Œtæus_, _Medea_, _Troades_) to compose the First _Act_ of a soliloquy and a chorus. This, when the chorus is not present, becomes of course a monologue. In the _Hippolytus_, _Octavia_, _Thebais_, and _Thyestes_, there _is_ dialogue in the first Act. But, even of these, the first two begin with a lyrical monologue, which is in effect a first _Scene_. Footnote 87: _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, p. 232. ----- The Discourse, or rather Letter (for it bears both titles, and in scale and character rather deserves the latter name) on Satire is confessedly supplementary to the other _Discorsi_, and may be at least connected with the fact that the indefatigable author had himself attempted a satiric piece, _Egle_. [Sidenote: _On Satire._] He lays stress on the special connection of the Satire with the cult of Bacchus, takes into consideration the poetical as well as the scenic form, mentions the mixed or Varronian variety, and even extends his view to the Bucolic or Pastoral proper. But there are only some five-and-twenty pages, and the thing seems to have been really composed at “request of friends.” From a critic who did so much it would be somewhat unreasonable to demand more. In fact, though Cinthio did not go so far along the high historic path of truth as did Patrizzi thirty years later, he set on that path a firm foot. For the moment, and in Italy, the _romanzi_ were the true battle-ground; just as in England, for instance, that battle-ground was to be found a little later in the drama. At a period so early as this, and so close to the actual revolution of the Renaissance, it could hardly be expected that any one should reach the vantage-ground of a comprehensive survey of _all_ literature, so as to deduce from it the positive and enfranchising, and not even from it the negative and disfranchising, laws of poetry. Not only had the vernaculars, with the exception of Italian itself, hardly furnished, at the time when Cinthio wrote, any modern literature fit to rank with the ancient—not only was it far too late, or far too early, to expect any one to give mediæval literature a fair chance with both—but men were still actually disputing whether the vernaculars had a right to exist. They were, like his namesake and clansman, to whom we come next, hinting surprise that any man of genius and culture should employ these vernaculars when he might write Latin, or, like one of his antagonists, Celio Calcagnini, aspiring to the disuse of vernacular for literary purposes altogether. In an atmosphere still so far from clear, with such heats and mists about, it is no small credit to Cinthio that, whether moved by mere parochial patriotism or by the secret feeling that _sua res_ as a novelist was at question, or by anything else, he heard and caught at the dominant of the tune of criticism proper.