pidemic.

We did not shun the theatres. We were not so unjust as to refuse his
share of merit as a playwright to Goldoni. We did not confound him with
Chiari, to whom we conceded nothing, or but little. Yet we were unable
to glance with other eyes than those of pitying derision upon the
tables of fine ladies, the writing-desks of gentlemen, the stalls of
booksellers and artisans, the hands and arms of passers in the street,
the rooms of public and private schools, colleges, even convents--all of
which were loaded with Goldoni's comedies, Chiari's comedies and
romances, the thousand trivialities and absurdities of both
quill-drivers--while everything the scribblers sent to press was valued
as a mirror of reform in literature, a model of right thinking and good
writing.

I hope that no one will be scandalised if I report a saying which I
heard with my own ears. There was a certain Abbe Salerni, Venetian-born,
a preacher of the gospel. He was in the habit of thundering forth
Lenten-sermons from the pulpits, and had a multitude of eager listeners.
This man announced one day, with the air of frank and sturdy
self-conceit, that he had arrived at composing his oratorical
masterpieces upon sacred themes by the unremitting study of Goldoni's
comedies.

I ought to render a candid account here of the impression made upon me
by those two deluges of ink, Goldoni and Chiari. To begin with Goldoni.
I recognised in him an abundance of comic motives, truth, and
naturalness. Yet I detected a poverty and meanness of intrigue; nature
copied from the fact, not imitated; virtues and vices ill-adjusted, vice
too frequently triumphant; plebeian phrases of low double meaning,
particularly in his Venetian plays; surcharged characters; scraps and
tags of erudition, stolen Heaven knows where, and clumsily brought in to
impose upon the crowd of ignoramusses. Finally, as a writer of
Italian--except in the Venetian dialect, of which he showed himself a
master--he seemed to me not unworthy to be placed among the dullest,
basest, and least correct authors who have used our idiom.

In spite of all the praises showered upon Goldoni, paid for or gratis,
by journalists, preface-writers, romancers, apologists, Voltaires, I do
not think that, with the single exception of his _Bourru Bienfaisant_,
which he wrote at Paris, which suited the French theatre, but which had
no success in its Italian translation here, he ever produced a perfect
dramatic piece.