y themselves.

Born in Venice in fair social position, Goldoni spent his childhood
chiefly in Chiozza, a ruder and humbler miniature of the island city
some twenty-five miles away. Though an incurable wanderer,--indeed, so
filled with the true Bohemian's feverish love for change that he never
could endure even success anywhere for many summers,--he yet gave more
of his best years, and a heartier loyalty, to Venice than to any other
home. He knew best, and delineated best, the ordinary life of the
lagoons. Mr. Howells, himself by long residence and love a
half-Venetian, declares that the comedies in the local dialect are
invariably the best, and next best the Italian plays whose scenes are at
least laid in Venice. Perhaps the critic is here himself unduly swayed
by his affections. Goldoni knew well nearly all Italian lands. He had
even, for a series of years, a career as an advocate in Pisa. "My comic
genius was not extinguished, but suppressed," he explains. He did not
even then give up play-writing, and a traveling theatre manager easily
beguiled him back to Venice. This was in 1747, and this same manager,
Medebac, setting up a new theatre in Venice, absorbed Goldoni's energies
for several years. It was in 1750 that he successfully carried out a
rash vow to produce sixteen new comedies in a single year! Among these
are a goodly number of his best, including 'The Coffee-House,' from
which a few scenes are given below.

Though he passed over into the service of a different theatre, traveled
constantly with his actors, accepted invitations to Parma, Rome, etc.,
to oversee the performance of his plays, yet he never gave up his home
in Venice altogether, until summoned to Paris in 1761. These fourteen
years, moreover, form the happiest period of his life. His income from
the theatres, from published editions of his comedies, and from his
inherited property, would have made him wealthy, but for his extravagant
and careless mode of life.

Despite one notable success in French with the comedy 'The Surly
Benefactor' (1771), Goldoni's life in France was relatively unprofitable
and ignoble. He became Italian teacher of various royal princesses, with
the utmost uncertainty and delay as to his salaries or pensions. Yet he
could never break the fascination of Paris. The art of the French actors
was a never-failing delight to him. There, at the age of eighty, in
French, he wrote and published his 'Memoirs.' The Revolution swept awa