In this period of awakening the chief gain was in the field of the drama. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, Italy, in this branch of literature, could not even remotely be compared with France, Spain, or England. In the sixteenth century comedies had not been wanting, and beside the purely Italian creation of improvised farce (now represented in Punch and Judy shows, pantomimes, and harlequinades), Ariosto had written literary comedies in close imitation of Plautus and Terence. Yet, from Ariosto to Goldoni we find practically but one genuine writer of comedy; this singularly enough, was Machiavelli, whose Mandragora was enormously popular, and was declared by Voltaire to be better than Aristophanes and but little inferior to Molière. But one book does not make a literature any more than one swallow makes a summer. It was left for Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) to give his country a number of comedies worthy of being compared with those of Molière. Goldoni was a kindly, amiable man of the world as well as of letters, bright and witty but withal somewhat superficial. Although a keen observer of the outer form of society and human nature, he lacked the depth and insight, and especially the subtle pathos of Molière. He was greatly influenced by the latter, whom he looked upon as his master. Like him he began with light comedy, farcical in nature, and gradually produced more and more comedies of manner and character. Yet he is not a slavish imitator of the great Frenchman, to whom, while inferior in earnestness and knowledge of the human heart, he was equal in dialogue, in development of plot, and in comic talent. Goldoni composed rapidly (once he wrote sixteen comedies in a year), and has left behind him one hundred and sixty plays and eighty musical dramas and opera texts. The musical drama is a peculiar Italian invention, and almost immediately reached perfection in Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), after whom it began rapidly to decline. Metastasio was universally admired and was, before Goldoni and Alfieri, the only Italian that had a European reputation, and who thus won some measure of glory for his country in her period of deepest degradation. His plays, meant to be set to music--the modern opera text is a debased form of this--were superficial, had no real delineation of character, yet were written in verses which flowed softly along like a clear stream through flowery meads. Light, artificial in sentiment, often lax in morals, yet expressing the courtly conventionalities of the times, Metastasio's poetry enjoyed vast popularity, while he himself became the favorite of the aristocratic society of Vienna, where he lived for fifty years, and the pride and glory of Italy. After him music became the all-important element in this peculiar form of drama, which thus became the modern opera, while the poetical element was degraded to the text thereof.