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 dramatisp 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 arr. "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 Marquis 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 with the actor Riccoboni, author of an esteemed work on the Italian stage, who lamented that the theatre of his own country afforded him no
