_.

Casanova died in 1798, but nothing was heard of the _Memoirs_ (which the
Prince de Ligne, in his own _Memoirs_, tells us that Casanova had read
to him, and in which he found _du dramatique, de la rapidite, du
comique, de la philosophie, des choses neuves, sublimes, inimitables
meme_) until the year 1820, when a certain Carlo Angiolini brought to
the publishing house of Brockhaus, in Leipzig, a manuscript entitled
_Histoire de ma vie jusqu'a l'an_ 1797, in the handwriting of Casanova.
This manuscript, which I have examined at Leipzig, is written on
foolscap paper, rather rough and yellow; it is written on both sides of
the page, and in sheets or quires; here and there the paging shows that
some pages have been omitted, and in their place are smaller sheets of
thinner and whiter paper, all in Casanova's handsome, unmistakable
handwriting. The manuscript is done up in twelve bundles, corresponding
with the twelve volumes of the original edition; and only in one place
is there a gap. The fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume are
missing, as the editor of the original edition points out, adding: 'It
is not probable that these two chapters have been withdrawn from the
manuscript of Casanova by a strange hand; everything leads us to believe
that the author himself suppressed them, in the intention, no doubt, of
re-writing them, but without having found time to do so.' The manuscript
ends abruptly with the year 1774, and not with the year 1797, as the
title would lead us to suppose.

This manuscript, in its original state, has never been printed. Herr
Brockhaus, on obtaining possession of the manuscript, had it translated
into German by Wilhelm Schuetz, but with many omissions and alterations,
and published this translation, volume by volume, from 1822 to 1828,
under the title, _Aus den Memoiren des Venetianers Jacob Casanova de
Seingalt_. While the German edition was in course of publication, Herr
Brockhaus employed a certain Jean Laforgue, a professor of the French
language at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript, correcting
Casanova's vigorous, but at times incorrect, and often somewhat Italian,
French according to his own notions of elegant writing, suppressing
passages which seemed too free-spoken from the point of view of morals
and of politics, and altering the names of some of the persons referred
to, or replacing those names by initials. This revised text was
published in twelve volumes, the first