"What you say is true," replied Prince Castel-Forte, mildly; "but you have only spoken of music and dancing, which do not comprise what we understand by the drama of any country." "It is much worse," interrupted the Count d'Erfeuil, "when tragedies are represented, or dramas that are not termed _dramas that end happily_: they unite more horrors in the course of five acts, than the imagination could form a picture of. In one piece of this kind, the lover kills the brother of his mistress in the second act; in the third he blows out the brains of his mistress herself upon the stage; her funeral occupies the fourth; in the interval, between the fourth and fifth acts, the actor who performs the lover comes forward, and announces to the audience with the greatest tranquillity in the world, the harlequinades which are to be performed on the following evening; he then reappears in the fifth act, to shoot himself with a pistol. The tragic actors are quite in harmony with the coldness and extravagance of these pieces: they commit all these horrors with the utmost calm. When a performer uses much action, they say he conducts himself like a preacher; for in truth, there is more acting in the pulpit than on the stage. It is very fortunate that these actors are so moderate in their pathos; for as there is nothing interesting, either in the piece or its situations, the more noise they made about it, the more ridiculous they would appear: it might still be endurable, were there any thing gay in this nonsense; but it is most stupidly dull and monotonous. There is in Italy no more comedy than tragedy; and here again we stand foremost. The only species of comedy peculiar to Italy is harlequinade. A valet, at once a knave, a glutton, and a coward; an old griping, amorous dupe of a guardian, compose the whole strength of these pieces. I hope you will allow that _Tartuffe_, and the _Misanthrope_, require a little more genius than such compositions."