ather Bettinelli._

The introduction to the first volume of my dramatic caprices (published
in 1772) gave a sufficiently full account of the dates and origins of my
ten _Fiabe Teatrali_, together with some notice of the literary quarrels
which occasioned them.[15] Yet I find it necessary to pass these matters
once more in review, since they concerned me not a little for the space
of twenty-five years and more, and have consequently much to do with my
Memoirs.

Here then are the steps which led me to bring those poetical
extravagances on the stage--extravagances which I never sought to value
or have valued at more than their true worth--which never had, or have,
or will have detractors among real lovers of literature--which always
had, and have, and will have the entire population of great cities for
their friends--which made, and make, and will for ever make a certain
sort of self-styled _literati_ mad with rage--Here then, as I said, are
the steps which led me to their publication.

I must begin by confessing three weaknesses, which pertained to my way
of looking upon literature.

In the first place, I resented the ruin of Italian poetry, established
in the thirteenth century, fortified and strengthened in the fourteenth,
somewhat shaken in the fifteenth, revived and consolidated in the
sixteenth by so many noble writers, spoiled in the seventeenth,
rehabilitated at the end of the last and at the beginning of the present
eighteenth century, then given over to the dogs and utterly corrupted by
a band of blustering fanatics during the period which we are doomed to
live in. These men, who have wrought the ruin I resent by their pretence
to be original, by their habit of damning our real masters and
institutors in the art of writing as puerile and frigid pedants,--these
men who lead the youth astray from solid methods and praiseworthy
simplicity, incite them to trample under foot whatever in past centuries
was venerated like the angel who conducted young Tobias, hurl them with
hungry and devouring intellects into the gulf of entities which have no
actual existence--these men, I say, have turned a multitude of hopeful
neophytes, if only they were guided by sound principles, into mere
visionary fools and the demoniacs of spurious inspiration.

In the second place, I resented the decadence of our Italian language
and the usurpations of sheer ignorance upon its purity. Purity of
diction I regarded as indispensable to pl