The most celebrated of Metastasio’s lyrical dramas are perhaps the _Olimpiade_, the _Achille in Sciro_, the _Clemenza di Tito_, and the _Atilio Regolo_. The _Artaserse_, the _Temistocle_, the _Zenobia_, have also a high reputation, and in truth the intervals of merit among his pieces are not very wide. The operatic dramatist is released from many of the obligations which press most heavily upon the tragic or comic poet; he is at liberty to mingle the manners and ideas of different ages and nations as much as he pleases; no great profundity of psychological analysis can be expected from him, for if he possessed this gift the conditions of his field of art would debar him from manifesting it. It is enough if his subject is interesting, his action lively and well combined, and his melody copious and spontaneous. Metastasio selected his themes with consummate judgment, and showed a Scribe-like power of devising bustling action and sudden surprises, while his tunefulness is remarkable even for an Italian poet. His pieces would have enthralled audiences even without literary charm. That they retain their place in the library after their disappearance from the stage proves him a poet as well as a dramatist. His oratorios resemble his secular pieces, but are less interesting. His cantatas have the air of loppings from his dramas. The chief merit of his other lyrical compositions is their inexhaustible melody. The vogue of the lyrical drama under Zeno and Metastasio was not favourable to the more legitimate forms of the art. “_Ce beau monstre_,” said Voltaire, “_étouffe Melpomène_.” If so, the Italian drama was stifled, like Desdemona, in her sleep. The extravagance of the first half of the seventeenth century had been succeeded by the torpor of the second, and nothing really good had been produced in either. It was not until 1713 that a tragedy appeared which deserved and obtained a European reputation. This was the _Merope_ of Count Scipione Maffei, whose principal work, his _Verona Illustrata_, has already been mentioned, and who, besides many other claims to distinction, gained an honourable fame as a natural philosopher, as the critical historian of chivalric orders, and as the denouncer of duelling. A man of this stamp, however gifted, was not likely to be richly endowed with the poetical temperament, and Maffei’s _Merope_ shares the almost universal fault of modern tragedies on classical subjects, it is essentially a work of reflection. It was composed with the deliberate purpose of retrieving the Italian drama from its degraded condition, and was the result of conversations wilh the actor Riccoboni, author of an esteemed work on the Italian stage, who lamented that the theatre of his own country afforded him no fine parts. The want was well supplied by _Merope_, the plot being highly dramatic, and the treatment, in the opinion of Matthew Arnold, more poetical than that of either of Maffei’s successors, Voltaire and Alfieri.