the Papal capital did not wholly cease to be the
resort of students and artists. The universities maintained
themselves in a respectable position--far different, indeed, from
that which they had held in the last century, yet not ignoble. Much
was being learned on many lines of study divergent from those
prescribed by earlier humanists. Padua, in particular, distinguished
itself for medical researches. This was the flourishing time,
moreover, of Academies in which, notwithstanding nonsense talked and
foolish tastes indulged, some solid work was done for literature and
science. The names of the Cimento, Delia Crusca and Palazzo Vernio
at Florence remind us of not unimportant labors in physics, in the
analysis of language, and in the formation of a new dramatic style
of music. At the same time the resurgence of popular literature and
the creation of popular theatrical types deserved to be particularly
noticed. It is as though the Italian nation at this epoch,
suffocated by Spanish etiquette and poisoned by Jesuitical
hypocrisy, sought to expand healthy lungs in free spaces of open
air, indulging in dialectical niceties and immortalizing street
jokes by the genius of masked comedy."

We shall perceive, then, in the productions of some representative
masters of the madrigal drama in the latter half of the sixteenth
century, an expression of this Italian eagerness to abandon even the
external attitude of serious contemplation, which the spectacular
delights of the intermezzi and the serious lyric drama had made at least
tolerable, and to turn to the uses of pure amusement the materials of a
clearly defined form of art. We shall find the dramatization of the
chatter of the street and the apparition of types familiar to the
farcical comedies and operas bouffes of later days. In the washerwomen
of Striggio we are not far from _Madame Angot_, and some of the
personages whom Vecchi humorously treated in his "Amfiparnaso" are
treading the stage of to-day. In these madrigal dramas, as we shall see,
the attempts to overcome the musical unsuitability of polyphonic music
to the purposes of dramatic dialogue led composers further and further
from the truth which had stood at the elbows of Poliziano's
contemporaries and immediate successors. Musicians went forward with the
madrigal till they found themselves in Vecchi's day confronted with a
genuine _reductio ad absurdum_. It was only at this time tha