--

"Sull'incude fatal del nostro pianto."
("Upon the fatal anvil of our tears.")

Nothing more need be said. With such monstrosities in metre, he had the
courage to proclaim himself a modern Pindar. Goldoni he looked down upon
like some gull of the lagoons. Yet, such as he was, Chiari succeeded in
mystifying a thousand empty brains, who admired him without
understanding a line he wrote.

It is not to be wondered at if a Goldoni and a Chiari, with a few
disciples and adherents, were able to create a temporary _furore_, when
we consider that this _furore_ flamed up in the precincts of the
theatres. Here all the population was divided into hostile camps, and
each party was so blind and bewitched as not to recognise the infinite
superiority of Goldoni as a comic playwright over his rival.

What is the force of righteous indignation when a vogue of this sort has
been launched on its career? That of Goldoni and Chiari was bound to run
its natural course, and when it died away, the other, which I have
described in the foregoing chapter, the vogue of immoderate, unnatural,
incorrect enthusiasts, so-styled sublime philosophers, came in, who
discovered new worlds in literature, and who are fawning now upon the
young men of our days, threatening new vocabularies, nay, new alphabets,
treating antiquity as a short-sighted idiot, and involving humanity in
an undistinguishable chaos of literary follies.

With regard to the mania created by Goldoni and Chiari, as may easily be
imagined, I looked upon it as a fungus growth upon opinion, worthy at
the best of laughter. I deemed that, at any rate, I had the right to be
the master of my own thoughts; and a trifle in verse which I wrote for
my amusement, without the intention of sending it to press, was the
accidental cause of obliging me to maintain my views against these poets
by a series of good-natured _jeux d'esprit_. My real friends know that I
harboured no envy, no sentiment of rivalry against them and their swamps
of volumes in octavo. Any one who has the justice to remember that I was
a mere amateur in literature, giving away gratis whatever issued from my
pen, will agree with my friends, and acknowledge that I was prompted by
a disinterested zeal in the cause of pure and unaffected writing. May
Heaven pardon those, and there are many of them, who have held me up for
detestation as a malignant satirist, seeking to found my own fame and
fortune upon the ruin of others!