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350 Commedia dell' Arte), which before the end of the sixteenth century had been launched by the Gelosi on its triumphant career. The captain, the doctor, the pantaloon, harlequin, and scaramouch were soon as popular in France and Spain as in Italy, and have left their mark on the comedy of Molière—even perhaps of Shakespeare and Jonson. Their effect in Italy was to make motley the only wear; and when the Spanish drama found its way through Naples into the Italian theatre, it was larded with buffoonery and indecency. Nay, when Addison witnessed a performance of the Cid at Venice in 1700, he found that noble tragedy also enlivened by interludes of the pantaloon and the harlequin. The whirligig of time brings its revenges. A living drama must have its roots in popular taste. The country which had rendered most obsequious reverence to classical authority in drama and criticism, had to allow a blend of kinds more inharmonious and inartistic than that at which tragi-comedy aimed, and which Shakespeare achieved in so many different ways.

Of prose writers Italy in the seventeenth century produced abundance, whose work in science, theology, history, and travels can be but touched on. Much of the prose of the period, especially in sermons, was affected by the same taste for conceits as the poetry, but there were writers of pure and eloquent Italian.

The greatest Italian of the century, Galileo Galilei