ishing care of centuries had consecrated as the guiding-star of
honor in the heart of the people. He hated the inroad of foreign ideas
and of foreign independence in the conduct of life. He believed in the
sacredness of custom and authority, and he preached it _con amore_ in
all his writings.

Gozzi lived an isolated and studious life. He seldom left his old ruined
palace, where at night "dances of rats" alone disturbed his quiet,
except on his way to rehearsals or to the evening representations. No
man in Venice was more loved; and well might he be, for he gave bread
and support to the whole of that little dramatic world of which he was
the centre and the inspiration. As he never consented to sell his work,
he remained very poor. His habits were simple, and with his own
inimitable _naivete_ he confesses that the whole of his worldly care
consists in having the largest of silver buckles on his shoes and
keeping his wig in the fashion.

Venice during the eighty years of Gozzi's life was the Venice of
unprincipled, corrupt men and women. It had become a masked ball, a mad
pleasure-place, where intrigue and adventure gave the chief interest to
each day. In art, in letters and in the conduct of life the most
frivolous or trivial or fleeting occupations engaged the attention and
absorbed the time. The old men forgot the dignity of their age in a
puerile leisure, and the young men were dissipated and purposeless.
People had nothing to do but to laugh at each other and to play with the
passing moment; and the loss of all sense of moral responsibility left
them adrift in the midst of the most glorious of national memories. One
has to wonder at the strange indifference which settled over those
descendants of the illustrious men whose names are built into the
magnificent palaces on both sides of the Grand Canal; and there is
perhaps no greater lesson than that which may be learnt from studying
the private history of the noble patrician families of Venice of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--men whose hearts were opened to all
great emotions--and by looking at the marionette life of the men and
women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as it is
portrayed in the pictures of Longhi, where the _Chamber of Sighs_ never
empties itself of the opulent gamblers who patronized the Ridotto night
and day.

When Gozzi was a young man his first initiation into life had been a
repeated experience of the playful capriciousn