its own children, endowed with its nature,
apt to understand its wishes and inclinations. And here, among his
compatriots, he resolved not to follow the bad theatrical taste in vogue
in favour of spectacular plays and scurrilous _Commedie dell' arte_, but
to take up for Italy the task accomplished by Moliere for France, and to
re-conduct comedy into the right road, from which it had wandered so
far.

"I had no rivals to combat," he writes, "I had only prejudices to
surmount."

The first play written for unmasked actors proved unsuccessful. Goldoni
was not daunted. He wrote a second. It was applauded to the echo, and
he saw himself well launched upon his career as a reformer. The great
obstacle to his entire success lay in the difficulty of finding actors,
as the masked parts could be taken by greatly inferior players; and
also by the circumstance, already pointed out to him by his critic of
"Amalasunta," that an Italian playwright had to think more of pleasing
his actors than his public. What Goldoni had to endure from this _gens
irritabilis_, from their rancour, vapours, caprices, stolid and open
opposition to his reform, is told with much good nature and sense of fun
in his Memoirs. It can have been far from easy to endure, and no doubt
often exasperated the author, though in his old age he can speak of it
so calmly and dispassionately. But Goldoni, even as a young man, was
wise, and proceeded slowly, first making himself and his name known
and popular on the old lines, and only risking his new ideas under
favourable conditions. Thus he respected the antique unities of time and
action, which, after all, save in the hands of great genius, are most
conducive to dramatic success, and he only infringed the unity of place
to a certain extent, always confining the action of the comedies within
the walls of the same town. He says, with a sagacity not common in his
profession, that he should not have met with so much opposition, had it
not been for the indiscreet zeal of his admirers, who exalted his merits
to so excessive a degree, that wise and cultivated people were roused to
contradict such fanaticism. As to the ill feeling roused by the ridicule
freely showered by Goldoni upon the corrupt customs of his time, he
takes no heed of it, save to redouble his efforts in the same direction.
Like Moliere, he had the courage to put upon the boards the defects and
absurdities of his own age, not merely those of a bygone time. And