The future master of comedy commenced his dramatic career with a melodrama, _Amalasunta_, which he burned, and followed this up with another, of whose success he afterwards professed himself ashamed. He was not long, nevertheless, in discovering his proper vocation; he inwardly, and from his point of view rightly--for he could never have been a Gozzi--declared war against the popular Comedy of Masks, and when a piece of his succeeded, whispered to himself, “Good, but not yet Molière.” The great Frenchman was the object of his idolatry, and justly, for not only was Molière the true monarch of the comic stage, but his period was neither too near nor too remote, and his world neither too like nor unlike Goldoni’s, for successful imitation. By 1753 Goldoni’s apprenticeship was over, and none but literary enemies contested his title of the Italian Molière, a title confirmed by the suffrage of posterity. _Un Curioso Accidente_, _Il Vero Amico_, _La Bottega del Caffè_, _La Locandiera_, and many other comedies that might be named, while true to the manners of a past age, retain all their freshness in our own. Italian audiences yet take delight in his pictures of their ancestors. “One of the best theatres in Venice,” says Symonds, “is called by his name. His house is pointed out by gondoliers to tourists. His statue stands almost within sight of the Rialto. His comedies are repeatedly given by companies of celebrated actors.” Yet as Cæsar called Terence a halved Menander, so we may term Goldoni a halved Molière. The Menandrine element in Molière is present with him; the Aristophanic is missing. Goldoni wants the French writer’s overpowering _vis comica_, and is happier in “catching the manners living as they rise” than in laying bare the depths of the heart. Wit, gaiety, elegance, simplicity, truth to nature, skill in dramatic construction, render him nevertheless a most delightful writer, and his fame is the more assured from his position as his country’s sole eminent representative in the region of polite comedy.