The players and publishers would be
able to disabuse them of this notion. But I do not choose to beg for
testimonials to my generosity; and perhaps I have not told the whole
truth about it in the chapter already written upon my own character.[22]

It was in the year 1757 then that I composed the little book in verse
which I have mentioned, closely following the style of good old Tuscan
masters, and giving it the title of _La Tartana degl'influssi per
l'anno bisestile 1757_.[23] This little work contained a gay critique in
abstract on the uses and abuses of the times. It was composed upon
certain verses of that obscure Florentine poet Burchiello, which I
selected as prophetic texts for my own disquisitions. It took the humour
of our literary club, and I dedicated it to a patrician of Venice,
Daniele Farsetti, to whom I also gave the autograph, without retaining
any copy for my own use. This Cavaliere, a man of excellent culture, and
a Mecaenas of the Granelleschi, wishing to give me an agreeable surprise,
and thinking perhaps that he would meet with difficulty in getting the
poem printed at Venice, sent it to Paris to be put in type, and
distributed the few copies which were struck off among his friends in
Venice.

This trifling volume might have gone the round of many hands, affording
innocent amusement by its broad and humorous survey over characters and
customs, if a few drops of somewhat pungent ink, employed in lashing the
bad writers of those days, had not played the part of venomous and
sacrilegious asps. Goldoni, besides being a regular deluge of dramatic
works, had in him I know not what diuretic medicine for composing little
things in verse, songs, rhyming diatribes, and other such-like poems of
a very muddy order. This gift he now exercised, while putting together a
collection of panegyrics on the patrician Veniero's retirement from the
rectorship of Bergamo, to vent one of his commonplace _terza-rima_
rigmaroles against my _Tartana degli influssi_. He abused the book as a
stale piece of mustiness, an inept and insufferable scarecrow; treating
its author as an angry man who deserved compassion, because (he chose to
say) I had wooed fortune in vain. Many other polite expressions of the
same stamp adorned these triplets.

Meanwhile, the famous Signor Lami, who at that time wrote the literary
paper of Florence, thought my _Tartana_ worthy of notice in his journal,
and extracted some of its stanzas on the decad