eciate the way he fulfilled it. His work was the
creation of a national theatre. He used his vivid imagination and the
ingenious turn of his fancy to personify the pet vices and the fatal
frivolity of the Venetians. He created fantastic beings, brilliant
caricatures and grotesque characters. They made a hit and became popular
favorites.

His plays, written especially for the dramatic troupe which he had taken
under his paternal protection, and which he loved, cared for, watched
over during twenty-five years of his life, are a strong and spicy satire
upon the follies of the eighteenth century--a subtle and sagacious
criticism of its universal immorality. Our humorist was greatly aided in
the prosecution of his work by the sustained rectitude of his own life.
With the naive confidence of a child he relates to us some of his
strange experiences of men and of women--mostly of women--and we feel
sorry when he is so cruelly and so unnecessarily deceived, and he must
lose his implicit trust in that young prima donna in whose purity of
soul he so unreservedly believed. How many years he had seen her, day
after day, first as a mere girl, then as a young wife and a young
mother, and always surrounding her with the homage of his admiration and
of his respect! She appears like one of those enshrined figures one is
surprised to find in out-of-the-way places, and which, after all, have
to be left to other eyes. Gozzi came very near losing the dignity of his
mental quietude--and that in spite of his mature age, for he was then
nearly fifty--in a Don Quixotism well worthy of a man who had so deeply
immersed his fancy in the fount of the Spanish drama, and whose head was
filled with romantic adventures. A strange, an almost unaccountable,
devotion bound him during five years to the erratic destiny of Ricci.
Yet his affection for her did not go beyond a sustained solicitude for
her welfare and an active interest in the development of her talent. For
a long time he blindly believed in her moral capacities, and he went to
work with the hope of winning her permanently to a pure and an elevated
life. It is touching to watch him centring his whole interest and
placing his paternal pride in that delusive will-o'-the-wisp glimmer of
goodness which must inevitably lead hope astray. Gozzi broke off his
friendship for her the day he found out she was less than he expected
her to be. But this time he did not laugh, though he tells his readers
that