written by friend or foe. Its unconscious admissions, its
general spirit, and the inferences which we draw from its perusal,
are far more valuable than any mere statement of facts or external
analysis, however scientific. When we become acquainted with
the series of events which led to the conception or attended the
production of some masterpiece of literature, a new light is thrown
upon its beauties, fresh life bursts forth from every chapter, and we
seem to have a nearer and more personal interest in its success. What
a powerful sensation, for instance, is that which we experience when,
after studying the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' Gibbon
tells us how the thought of writing it came to him upon the Capitol,
among the ruins of dead Rome, and within hearing of the mutter of the
monks of Ara Coeli, and how he finished it one night by Lake Geneva,
and laid his pen down and walked forth and saw the stars above his
terrace at Lausanne!

The memoirs of Alfieri and Goldoni are not deficient in any of the
characteristics of good autobiography. They seem to bear upon their
face the stamp of truthfulness, they illustrate their authors' lives
with marvellous lucidity, and they are full of interest as stories.
But it is to the contrast which they present that our attention should
be chiefly drawn. Other biographies may be as interesting and amusing.
None show in a more marked manner two distinct natures endowed with
genius for one art, and yet designed in every possible particular for
different branches of that art. Alfieri embodies Tragedy; Goldoni
is the spirit of Comedy. They are both Italians: their tragedies and
comedies are by no means cosmopolitan; but this national identity of
character only renders more remarkable the individual divergences by
which they were impelled into their different paths. Thalia seems to
have made the one, body, soul, and spirit; and Melpomene the other;
each goddess launched her favourite into circumstances suited to the
evolution of his genius, and presided over his development, so that at
his death she might exclaim,--Behold the living model of my Art!

Goldoni was born at Venice in the year 1707; he had already reached
celebrity when Alfieri saw the light for the first time, in 1749, at
Asti. Goldoni's grandfather was a native of Modena, who had settled
in Venice, and there lived with the prodigality of a rich and
ostentatious 'bourgeois.' 'Amid riot and luxury did I enter the
wo