This then is the origin of the unities. Our discussion must have made it clear how little they deserve the traditional title of Aristotelian unities, or as a recent critic with equal inaccuracy calls them, the Scaligerian unities (_unites scaligeriennes_).[197] Nor were they, as we have seen, first formulated in France, though this was the opinion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus Dryden says that "the unity of place, however it might be practised by the ancients, was never one of their rules: we neither find it in Aristotle, Horace, or any who have written of it, till in our age the French poets first made it a precept of the stage."[198] It may be said, therefore, that just as the unity of action is _par excellence_ the Aristotelian unity, so the unities of time and place are beyond a doubt the Italian unities. They enter the critical literature of Europe from the time of Castelvetro, and may almost be said to be the last contributions of Italy to literary criticism. Two years after their formulation by Castelvetro they were introduced into France, and a dozen years after this formulation, into England. It was not until 1636, however, that they became fixed in modern dramatic literature, as a result of the _Cid_ controversy. This is approximately a hundred years after the first mention of the unity of time in Italian criticism. V. _Comedy_ The treatment of comedy in the literary criticism of this period is entirely confined to a discussion and elaboration of the little that Aristotle says on the subject of comedy in the _Poetics_. Aristotle, it will be remembered, had distinguished tragedy from comedy in that the former deals with the nobler, the latter with the baser, sort of actions. Comedy is an imitation of characters of a lower type than those of tragedy,--characters of a lower type indeed, but not in the full sense of the word bad. "The ludicrous is merely a subdivision of the ugly. It may be defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain."[199] From these few hints the Italian theorists constructed a body of comic doctrine. There is, however, in the critical literature of this period no attempt to explain the theory of the indigenous Italian comedy, the _commedia dell' arte_. The classical comedies of Plautus and Terence were the models, and Aristotle's _Poetics_ the guide, of all the discussions on comedy during the Renaissance. The distinction between the characters of comedy and tragedy has already been explained in sufficient detail. All that remains to be done in treating of comedy is to indicate as briefly as possible such definitions of it as were formulated by the Renaissance, and the special function which the Renaissance understood comedy to possess.