ved nevertheless to study medicine
in order to earn an honest livelihood, and, wonderful to tell, he became
a very popular and successful physician, practising first at Perugia. It
was there that, only eight years old, Carlino, as he was then called,
wrote a comedy, which so vastly pleased his father that in consequence
he resolved to give him the best education within his reach. To this
end he placed him in the local Jesuit school. At first the boy, shy and
repressed, cut a bad figure, but by the end of the first term he came
out at the head of his class, to the immense delight of his father. To
reward him for this success, his parents instigated for his benefit
what we should now call private theatricals. As women were forbidden
to appear on the stage within the Papal States, to which Perugia then
belonged, Carlino took the part of the prima donna, and was further
called upon to write a prologue, which, according to the taste of the
day, was absurdly affected and hyperbolical. Goldoni gives in his
Memoirs the opening sentence of this literary effort, and it may serve
as a measure of the extent to which he became a reformer of Italian
style:--

"Most benignant Heaven, behold us, like butterflies, spreading in the
rays of your most splendid sun, the wings of our feeble inventions,
which bear our flight towards a light so fair."

To compare this bombast with the crystal clearness and simplicity of the
language of Goldoni's comedies, is to gain a fair estimate of what he
had to overcome and what he achieved.

A while after, the family removed to Chioggia, the climate of Perugia
not being suited to Goldoni's mother. He himself was sent to Rimini to
study philosophy in the Dominican school, a study which in those days
was considered indispensable for the medical career to which he was
destined. But philosophy as taught at Rimini did not attract our hero,
and instead of poring over the long passages dictated to him by his
professor, he read Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, and the fragments of
Menander. Nor did the philosophic debates amuse him half as much as a
company of actors with whom he contrived to knock up an acquaintance.
Hearing that these people, to his immense regret, were leaving Rimini,
and that of all places in the world they were proceeding to Chioggia,
it occurred to the youthful scamp that nothing could be more easy and
delightful than to go with them in the big barge they had hired for
their transit. The