y he
was at work on a singular variety of subjects, in addition to the
Memoirs, and to the various books which he published during those years.
We see him jotting down everything that comes into his head, for his own
amusement, and certainly without any thought of publication; engaging in
learned controversies, writing treatises on abstruse mathematical
problems, composing comedies to be acted before Count Waldstein's
neighbours, practising verse-writing in two languages, indeed with more
patience than success, writing philosophical dialogues in which God and
himself are the speakers, and keeping up an extensive correspondence,
both with distinguished men and with delightful women. His mental
activity, up to the age of seventy-three, is as prodigious as the
activity which he had expended in living a multiform and incalculable
life. As in life everything living had interested him so in his
retirement from life every idea makes its separate appeal to him; and he
welcomes ideas with the same impartiality with which he had welcomed
adventures. Passion has intellectualised itself, and remains not less
passionate. He wishes to do everything, to compete with every one; and it
is only after having spent seven years in heaping up miscellaneous
learning, and exercising his faculties in many directions, that he turns
to look back over his own past life, and to live it over again in memory,
as he writes down the narrative of what had interested him most in it. 'I
write in the hope that my history will never see the broad day light of
publication,' he tells us, scarcely meaning it, we may be sure, even in
the moment of hesitancy which may naturally come to him. But if ever a
book was written for the pleasure of writing it, it was this one; and an
autobiography written for oneself is not likely to be anything but frank.

'Truth is the only God I have ever adored,' he tells us: and we now know
how truthful he was in saying so. I have only summarised in this article
the most important confirmations of his exact accuracy in facts and
dates; the number could be extended indefinitely. In the manuscripts we
find innumerable further confirmations; and their chief value as
testimony is that they tell us nothing which we should not have already
known, if we had merely taken Casanova at his word. But it is not always
easy to take people at their own word, when they are writing about
themselves; and the world has been very loth to believe in Cas