, had turned round and taken the bread out
of their mouths. Sacchi, in these circumstances, withdrew his company to
the Court of Portugal, where they prospered, until a far more formidable
enemy than a brace of poets assailed them. The terrible earthquake of
Lisbon put a stop to all amusements in that capital; and our poor
players, having lost their occupation, returned to Venice after an
absence of some four years, and encamped in the theatre of San Samuele.

Upon their arrival, they met with a temporary success. Many amateurs of
the old drama, who were bored to death with Martellian verses and such
plays as the _Filosofi Inglesi_, _Pamelas_, _Pastorelle Fedeli_,
_Plautuses_, _Molieres_, _Terences_, and _Torquato Tassos_, then in
vogue, hailed them with enthusiasm. During the first year the four masks
and the soubrette, with some other actors of merit in the extempore
style, took the wind out of Goldoni's and Chiari's sails. Little by
little, however, the novelties poured forth by these two fertile
writers, who kept on treating the clever fellows as contemptible
mountebanks and insipid buffoons, prevailed, and reduced them to almost
total neglect.

It seemed to me that I should be able to indulge my humour for laughter
if I made myself the colonel of this regiment. I also hoped to score a
victory for the insulted Granelleschi by drawing crowds to Sacchi's
theatre with my dramatic allegories based on nursery-tales. The fable of
_L'Amore delle Tre Melarancie_ made a good beginning. My adversaries
were driven mad by the revolt it caused among playgoers, by its parodies
and hidden meanings, which the newspapers industriously explained,
describing many things which I had never put there. They attempted to
hoot it down by clumsy abuse, affecting at the same time disgust and
contempt for its literary triviality. Forgetting that it had been
appreciated and enjoyed by people of good birth and culture, they called
it a mere buffoonery to catch the vulgar. Its popularity they attributed
to the co-operation of the four talented masks, whom they had sought to
extirpate, and to the effect of the transformation scenes which it
contained, ignoring the real spirit and intention of this comic sketch
in a new style.

Laughing at their empty malice, I publicly maintained that art in the
construction of a piece, well-managed conduct of its action, propriety
of rhetoric and harmony of diction, were sufficient to invest a puerile
fantasti