s seen no less remarkably in regard
to courage. Alfieri was a reckless rider, and astonished even English
huntsmen by his desperate leaps. In one of them he fell and broke
his collar-bone, but not the less he held his tryst with a fair lady,
climbed her park gates, and fought a duel with her husband. Goldoni
was a pantaloon for cowardice. In the room of an inn at Desenzano
which he occupied together with a female fellow-traveller, an attempt
was made to rob them by a thief at night. All Goldoni was able to do
consisted in crying out for help, and the lady called him 'M. l'Abbe'
ever after for his want of pluck. Goldoni must have been by far the
more agreeable of the two. In all his changes from town to town of
Italy he found amusement and brought gaiety. The sights, the theatres,
the society aroused his curiosity. He trembled with excitement at the
performance of his pieces, made friends with the actors, taught them,
and wrote parts to suit their qualities. At Pisa he attended as
a stranger the meeting of the Arcadian Academy, and at its close
attracted all attention to himself by his clever improvisation. He was
in truth a ready-witted man, pliable, full of resource, bred half a
valet, half a Roman _graeculus_. Alfieri saw more of Europe than
Goldoni. France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, Spain, all
parts of Italy he visited with restless haste. From land to land he
flew, seeking no society, enjoying nothing, dashing from one inn door
to another with his servants and his carriages, and thinking chiefly
of the splendid stud of horses which he took about with him upon his
travels. He was a lonely, stiff, self-engrossed, indomitable man. He
could not rest at home: he could not bear to be the vassal of a king
and breathe the air of courts. So he lived always on the wing, and
ended by exiling himself from Sardinia in order to escape the trammels
of paternal government. As for his tragedies, he wrote them to win
laurels from posterity. He never cared to see them acted; he bullied
even his printers and correctors; he cast a glove down in defiance
of his critics. Goldoni sought the smallest meed of approbation. It
pleased him hugely in his old age to be Italian master to a French
princess. Alfieri openly despised the public. Goldoni wrote because he
liked to write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers.
Against Alfieri's hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, we
have to set Goldoni's love of Venic