At the same time I must add that he never produced one
without some excellent comic trait. In my eyes he had always the
appearance of a man who was born with the innate sense of how sterling
comedies should be composed, but who, by defect of education, by want of
discernment, by the necessity of satisfying the public and supplying new
wares to the poor Italian comedians through whom he gained his
livelihood, and by the hurry in which he produced so many pieces every
year to keep himself afloat, was never able to fabricate a single play
which does not swarm with faults.

In the course of our playful and airy polemics--polemics which had more
the form of witty squibs than formal criticisms--polemics which we
Granelleschi never deigned to aim directly, in due form of siege,
against the outpoured torrents of Goldoni and Chiari, but which we meant
to act as sinapisms on the minds of sluggish youths, besotted by that
trash and froth of ignorance--I once defied the whole world to point out
a single play of Goldoni's which could be styled perfect. I confined
myself to one, because I did not care to be drowned in an ocean; and I
felt confident that I could fulfil my part of the challenge by making
even boys and children see how the public had been taken in. No one
stooped to take my glove up, and to name the perfect comedy. The goad
and lash of pleasantry, with which I exposed Goldoni's stupidities, only
elicited the following two verses, which he wrote and printed, and which
exactly illustrate the stupidity I accused him of:--

"Pur troppo io so che buon scrittor non sono,
E che ai fonti miglior non ho bevuto."

("Too well I know that I am no good writer,
And that I have not drunk at the best fountains.")

Proceeding next to Abbe Chiari. In him I found a brain inflamed,
disordered, bold to rashness, and pedantic; plots dark as astrological
predictions; leaps and jumps demanding seven-league boots; scenes
isolated, disconnected from the action, foisted in for the display of
philosophical sententious verbiage; some good theatrical surprises, some
descriptions felicitous in their blunt _naivete_; pernicious ethics;
and, as for the writer, I found him one of the most turgid, most
inflated, nay, the most turgid, the most inflated, of this century. I
once saw a sonnet of his, printed and posted on the shops in Venice; it
was composed to celebrate the recovery from illness of a patrician, and
began with this verse: