species; and those elegant productions, in which the Italians have introduced the characters and occupations of rural life into the drama, are frequently founded on the exposure of children, who, after being brought up as shepherds by reputed fathers, are recognised by their real parents, from ornaments or tokens fastened to their persons when abandoned in infancy or childhood. The _Cistellaria_ has been more directly imitated in _Gli Incantesimi_ of Giovam-Maria Cecchi, a Florentine dramatist of the sixteenth century. That part, however, of the plot which gives name to the piece, has been invented by the Italian author himself. _Curculio_.—The subject of this play, turns on a recognition similar to that which occurs in the _Cistellaria_. It derives its title from the name of a parasite, who performs the part usually assigned by Plautus to an intriguing slave; and he is called Curculio, from a species of worm which eats through corn. It is worthy of observation, that in the fourth act of this play, the Choragus, who was master of the Chorus, and stage-manager, or leader of the band, is introduced, expressing his fear lest he should be deprived of the clothes he had lent to Curculio, and addressing to the spectators a number of satirical remarks on Roman manners. Vossius has noticed the inadvertency or ignorance of Plautus in this drama, where, though the scene is laid in Epidaurus, he sends the parasite to Caria, and brings him back in four days. This part of the comedy he therefore thinks has been invented by Plautus himself, since a Greek poet, to whom the geography of these districts must have been better known, would not have carried the parasite to so great a distance in so short a period. _Epidicus_.—This play is so called from the name of a slave who sustains a principal character in the comedy, and on whose rogueries most of the incidents depend. Its most serious part consists in the discovery of a damsel, who proves to be sister to a young man by whom she has been purchased as a slave. The play has no prologue; but, at the beginning, a character is introduced, which the ancients called _persona protatica_,—that is, a person who enters only once, and at the commencement of the piece, for the sake of unfolding the argument, and does not appear again in any part of the drama. Such are Sosia, in the _Andria_ of Terence, and Davus, in his _Phormio_. This is accounted rather an inartificial mode of informing the audience of the circumstances previous to the opening of the piece. It is generally too evident, that the narrative is made merely for the sake of the spectators; as there seldom appears a sufficient reason for one of the parties being so communicative to the other. Such explanations should come round, as it were, by accident, or be drawn involuntarily from the characters themselves in the course of the action.