Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found in Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli’s Mandragola.  The Frate Timoteo of this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment.  Frate Timoteo has a fine Italian priestly pose.

Donna:  Credete voi, che’l Turco passi questo anno in Italia?

F. Tim.:  Se voi non fate orazione, si.

Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries, cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian gallery.  Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the decadence of the Republic with a French pencil, and was an Italian Scribe in style.

The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies as that which furnished the idea of the Menteur to Corneille.  But you must force yourself to believe that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie upon lie.  There is no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity.  Spanish Comedy is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of marionnettes.  The Comedy might be performed by a troop of the corps de ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an animated shuffle of feet.  It is, in fact, something other than the true idea of Comedy.  Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, as the Portuguese call it, affaimados of one another, famine-stricken; and all the tragic elements are on the stage.  Don Juan is a comic character that sends souls flying:  nor does the humour of the breaking of a dozen women’s hearts conciliate the Comic Muse with the drawing of blood.

German attempts at Comedy remind one vividly of Heine’s image of his country in the dancing of Atta Troll.  Lessing tried his hand at it, with a sobering effect upon readers.  The intention to produce the reverse effect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poor old Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and his left, consists the fun.  Jean Paul Richter gives the best edition of the German Comic in the contrast of Siebenkas with his Lenette.  A light of the Comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the splendid figure of the man, but no more.

The German literary laugh, like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather monstrous—­never a laugh of men and women in concert.  It comes of unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar humours of their little earthmen.  Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained to:  sentimentalism waylays them in the flight.  Here and there a Volkslied or Marchen shows a national aptitude for stout animal laughter; and we see that the literature is built on it, which is hopeful so far; but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy of the Broad Grin, that seems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and reaches its perfection