The eighteenth century, if chiefly remarkable in Italian literary history for the dawn of national regeneration, and the assimilation of literature to the type prevailing in other European countries, is also memorable as the period when Italian dramatists first acquired a European renown. This recognition may be considered to date from the production of Count Maffei’s _Merope_ in 1714, and from the summons of Apostolo Zeno to Vienna a few years afterwards. These two men represented, one, the classical tragedy, which, notwithstanding its conventional acceptance, has ever remained an exotic in Italy; the other, that special creation of Italian genius, the musical play or opera. Later in the century, Alfieri and Metastasio carried both forms nearer to perfection, and Goldoni gave his country a comedy at once brilliant and regular. Yet the genuine dramatic life of the nation is to be found in the _commedia dell’ arte_, or Comedy of Masks, contemned by the learned, but dear to the people, which, except for a brief interval in the hands of Carlo Gozzi, failed to clothe itself with literary form, but has pervaded the theatres of Europe in the costume of harlequin, columbine, and pantaloon. As the simplest, the _commedia dell’ arte_ is probably the oldest form of the drama. There can be no question that the Greek rustics who smeared their faces with wine-lees at the Dionysiac festivals, and from whose improvised songs and gestures Greek comedy was developed, virtually enacted the same parts as the Tuscan and Neapolitan peasants, who, inheriting this rude entertainment from Roman times, preserved it through the Middle Ages, until it assumed new importance in the general awakening of the sixteenth century. The original wine-lees gave place to masks, and as masks cannot be varied _ad infinitum_, the characters became limited to a few well-defined and salient types. Hence every piece had substantially the same personages; although the Italian comedy allows of numerous variations upon its four stock parts. This caused the dialogue to be mainly extemporaneous; and as comedy is more easily extemporised than tragedy, the pieces tended more and more towards farce. At the same time, “the fertility of fancy, quickness of intelligence, facility of utterance, command of language, and presence of mind,” indispensable to a good impromptu comedian, bestowed a certain regularity upon the performance. The actor was obliged to observe the conditions imposed by the character he represented, conventional as this was: if he enacted Pantaloon, he must not comport himself as Brighella or the Doctor, and _vice versâ_. As in the Indian drama, the comic passages were usually in dialect; the serious, if any, in cultivated language. Despised as literature, these pieces attained great popularity even beyond the limits of Italy, especially in Paris, where they divided public favour with the national theatre for a hundred and fifty years.