f to acts of
fervid contrition with the aid of his confessor, he obtained a last
parting benediction and died.

Two writers, two rival would-be poets, and critics one of the other,
held then the literary sway over Venice. One was the licentious and
unscrupulous Abbe Chiari, who imitated with a certain success the
artificial manner of the brilliant French writers of the day: the other
was Goldoni, then at the height of his fame. It is difficult for us,
placed as we are so far from that tinselly age, to form an idea of the
fever and furore of admiration which raged in Venice for these two men.
A deluge of adulatory literary expression poured on every side in the
shape of comedies, tragedies, plays, sonnets, poems, songs and
apologies, all of them inflating with a fervid enthusiasm the
inflammable youth of the most mobile of populations. The comedies of
Goldoni were the fashion. They were found in everybody's hands, in
ladies' rooms, on shop counters and on the benches of workmen. The plain
literal copy of Nature, the unblushing _sans-gene_ of a sportive
cynicism, pleased the indolent imagination of the blase and immoral
Venetians. And the infatuation was carried so far that a certain abbe,
the fashionable preacher of the day, boasted that he preached his Lent
sermons only after he had read a comedy of Goldoni!

Gozzi fell in the very midst of that literary ebullition, and watched
curiously its ephemeral duration; for, like a brilliant soap-bubble
blown by merry children, it soon vanished into nothing. Even Goldoni
could not retain his hold on minds which, if they knew it not, needed a
more satisfying nourishment than the uninspiring, material rendering of
characters overcharged with vices or virtues inharmoniously collocated.

Gozzi, persecuted by extreme poverty, stepped on the scene with the
determination and the power to substitute for works full of defects and
cynical in their influence his own conceptions of life. It was throwing
the glove in the face of popular favor, and it opened literary
skirmishes which lasted from 1757 to 1761, and determined his vocation
as a a writer of plays and a theatrical manager. If we remember how
minds had lost all nice critical perception, and had become too confused
to distinguish between a good and a bad literary style, having
accustomed themselves to admire at large whatever served for amusement,
we shall better understand what was the task that Gozzi took upon
himself, and appr