they may well laugh at him for his credulity, his childish,
untaught experience, his romantic effort to believe in and to create an
impossible ideal.

What makes Gozzi's memoirs so interesting is, above all, their vitality.
A fresh, bounding current of life runs through them, and while watching
it you take no notice of those _debris_ of character which an austere
moralist would surely count up and remember. In the midst of extreme
licentiousness, Gozzi endeavored to awaken in the Venetians a sense of
the dignity of existence by placing before their eyes tangible ideas of
virtue. The public is a materialist by right of usage, and therefore
prefers the reality of the theatre to all other forms of teaching or of
amusement. Rouge and tinsel have the gift of persuasion. Gozzi felt that
instinctively, and few play-writers have been more successful as an
influence than he was. At the avenue of every new sensation, and gifted
with a quick-catching sense of gayety, he lost nothing of the play which
men and women enacted before him. He observed, he listened carefully:
nothing escaped the grasp of his constructive and fanciful mind. His
daily walks through the most populous streets; his habitual lingering
around the fashionable shops where pretty modistes attracted the idle
admiration of idlers; his morning visit to the Rialto, and his
never-failing appearance on the Piazza when everybody was assembled
there in the afternoon,--these were the varied sources of his study of
his contemporaries and also of his dramatic inspiration. Though at that
time there were several playhouses in Venice, and going to the theatre
was then, as it is now, the favorite way of spending the evening, no
theatre was so well patronized and so crowded as that of San Samuele,
where Venetian nobles and high-born women dazzled the eye of the people
with their splendor, while an unbounded admiration welcomed some new
play from the well-known, the genial and much-loved Count Carlo Gozzi.
And yet, reading these same plays, may we not somewhat wonder at the
extravagant praise that was showered upon them in those far-off days?
They are sketchy, sparkling, interesting by their movement and color.
Like a piece of faceted glass they catch and radiate light. But they are
not distinguished by any originality of thought nor by a profound and
far-reaching philosophy. They are society-studies, an exact portraying
of what was considered _le beau monde_. Gozzi had too much co