ini, governor-general of Dalmatia. It was to go
there and to meet a new fate that Gozzi, then a lad of sixteen, left
Venice on board of a ship of war, having for his whole fortune his
youth, his guitar and a few books.

It was only after he had become an old man that he wrote the story of
his life, and that he so piquantly portrayed the physiognomy of the
Venetian people in his famous _Memorie inutile_, which, as he quaintly
says, he published "from humility." The _Memorie inutile_ in which Gozzi
has depicted himself with such lifelike realism are sincere and
vivacious, and rival Diderot and Rousseau for directness, luminousness
and interest. Gozzi's nature is as free from conceit as it is from that
reserve which is sometimes mistaken for the enviable result of
hereditary culture, when it often is but the makeshift of vanity to
cover mental penury. The serenity of his soul never fails him even under
the most disheartening circumstances. His unalterable gayety, his
playfulness and his genial humor, just a little bit satirical, made him
the best of fellows and the most capital companion. None of the changes
or chances of an adventurous life seem to have either abated or checked
the flow of his animal spirits. He took hold of things and of the people
he met by their laughable side. Hence the remarkable elasticity and the
buoyancy of his writings. How far he stands from the reactionary
romantic movement of a later literature we may know if we notice that
there is no morbid self-retrospection and no shadow of melancholy in any
one page he ever wrote. When domestic difficulties and the complications
attending the dismemberment of the family after the death of his
paralytic father--whom he worshipped--absorbed his whole mind, and he
had to call upon his reserved strength of character to endure sorrow,
Gozzi kept up a brave heart. He believed in his vocation as a writer of
plays, and he fed his talent by an indulgent and sympathetic
comprehension of human nature.

He says: "It is an endless amusement for me to see the world, such as it
is in my century, and to contemplate the big caldron in which all our
follies are kept boiling. Is it not an immense farce? and am I not right
to make it the plaything of my reflections, and to laugh as I keep
counting the somersaults of humanity?" These "somersaults" are precisely
what Gozzi has so successfully reproduced upon the scene.

It was while he lived in wild Dalmatia that Gozzi had f