had no chance of surviving the improvised style of
comedy, to support which Gozzi composed them, and which he fondly
imagined immortal. Goethe, in 1788, was present at a performance given
by the last debris of Sacchi's company; but when the old _Commedia
dell'Arte_ and the old actors died out, the _Fiabe_ were relegated to
marionettes and puppet-shows. The poet and the man of letters dwindled
in Gozzi, but the man of business survived. His correspondence during
this fourth period shows him engaged in various commercial affairs upon
a small scale, minute in his accounts, involved in litigation, attentive
to the produce of his farms, busied about the interests of friends,
trafficking in lace and stuffs, groceries, wine, fowls, and
carriages.[86] This forms a curious contrast to the romantic portrait of
the old man vamped up for us by Paul de Musset. The ordinary troubles of
advanced age--rheums, aches, and infirmities--fell upon him. In one of
his letters to Innocenzio Massimo he describes their correspondence as
"a hypochondriacal gazette." On the 13th of February 1804 he signed a
holographic will, which shows him still loyal to his conservative creed
in religion, politics, philosophy, and morals. At this time he appears
to have been living in the Campo S. Angelo, one of the broadest,
busiest, and sunniest squares of Venice. Indeed, he had quitted the
ancestral palace of the Gozzi at S. Cassiano many years before, finding
it too distant from the theatres and the piazza. For a long while he
occupied a casino alone in the Calle Lunga S. Moise. The little dwelling
belonged to him; and in a passage of his Memoirs, which did not lend
itself to the scheme of my translation, he relates the circumstances of
his removal to this habitation.[87] I shall insert it here, because it
throws light upon the last stage of Gozzi's journey in this world. "Many
years," he says, "had passed away since my brothers Francesco and Almoro
with their families were established in Friuli, while I remained at
Venice, the sole occupant of our paternal mansion. For me alone, the
vast place was like a wilderness. In the winter I shivered with cold
there. Snow, rain, and the Rialto caused me innumerable annoyances when
I left the theatres at night to gain my distant home. I was growing old,
and this made the journey seem each year more irksome. A casino which I
owned in the quarter of S. Maria Zobenigo, Calle Lunga S. Moise, not far
from S. Marco, had been