authors, with
a view to getting hold of their works; then they turn round and cast
their pretended losses in the author's teeth. To hear them, you would
imagine that books for which they had begged on their knees before they
sent them to press, were now a load of useless stones encumbering their
shelves. The wretched pence they fling at a writer for some masterpiece
on which he has distilled the best part of his brains, are doled out
with the air of bestowing alms. More fuss is made about it, and it costs
more effort, than if the money were being paid for masses for the dead,
who have no need to clothe and feed themselves. All this is bad enough.
But Apollo protect a poet from being reduced to serve a troop of our
comedians at wages! There is not a galley-slave more abjectly condemned
to servitude than he. There is not a stevedore who carries half the
weight that he does; not an ass who gets more blows and fouler language,
if his drama fails to draw the whole world in a fever of excitement to
the theatre.

For these reasons, I have always shrunk from letting out my pen to hire.
On the frequent occasions when family affairs and litigation have
emptied my purse, I always chose rather to borrow from friends than to
plunge into the mire and rake up a few filthy stinking sequins. In the
one case I incurred the pleasing burden of gratitude to my obligers; in
the second I should have bent beneath the weight of shameful
self-abasement.

Not even the brotherly terms on which I lived with comedians, nor my
free gift to them through five-and-twenty years of all my writings for
the stage, preserved me from the acts of ingratitude, and the annoyances
which are described in the ensuing chapters of my Memoirs. Think then
what would have become of me if I had been their salaried poet!

Italy lacks noblemen, to play the part of Mecaenas, and to protect men of
letters and the theatre. Had there been such, and had they thought me
worthy of their munificence, I should not have blushed to receive it.
Knowing my country, however, and Venice in particular, I never allowed
myself to indulge flattering dreams of any such honourable patronage.

Sustained by my natural keen sense of the ludicrous, I have never even
felt saddened by seeing the morality, which I held for sound and sought
to diffuse through my writings, turned upside down by the insidious
subtleties and sophisms of our century. On the contrary, it amused me
vastly to notice how