y
his negligent patrons. In poverty and utter neglect he died at last,
just as the republicans were ready to restore his royal pension.

Goldoni was the child of Italy and of the eighteenth century. He had no
serious quarrel with his environment. He was not greatly superior, in
actual character or aspirations, to his associates. His affection for
his devoted wife did not save him from many a wandering passion. The
promising prima donnas, in particular, found in him an all too devoted
instructor and protector. The gaming-table and the lottery are
apparently irresistible to any true Italian, and Goldoni knew by heart
the passions which he ridicules or condemns, though without bitterness,
upon his stage. His oft-repeated claim to have reformed the Italian
theatre meant chiefly this: that between the lyrical drama of Metastasio
on the one hand, and the popular masque with stock characters on the
other,--and while contributing to both these forms of art,--he did
firmly establish the comedy of plot and dialogue, carefully learned and
rehearsed, in which the players must speak the speech as it is
pronounced to them by the poet.

Goldoni himself acknowledges, perhaps not too sincerely, in his Parisian
memoirs, the superiority, the mastership, of Moliere. In truth, the
great Frenchman stands, with Aristophanes and Shakespeare, upon a lonely
height quite unapproached by lesser devotees of Thalia. We must not seek
in Goldoni a prober of the human heart, not even a fearless satirist of
social conditions. In his rollicking good-humor and content with the
world as he finds it, Goldoni is much like Plautus. He is moreover under
a censorship hardly less severe. He dares not, for instance, introduce
upon his stage any really offensive type of Venetian nobleman. As for
religious dictation, the convent must not even be mentioned, though the
_aunt_ with whom the young lady is visiting sometimes becomes as
transparent an idiom as the "uncle" of a spendthrift cockney! The
audience, moreover, demand only diversion, not serious instruction (as
Goethe complains, even of his grave Germans, in the 'Prolog im
Theater'). It is remarkable, under all these conditions, how healthy,
how kindly, how proper, most of Goldoni's work is. Doubtless, like
Goldsmith, he could preach the more gracefully, persuasively, and
unobservedly, because he never attempted to escape from the very vices
or indulgences that he satirizes. But even the most determined seeker