overwhelmed me with compliments, from which I would fain have escaped. I was too tired to support all this ceremony; and, besides, not knowing whence all this enthusiasm sprang, I was angry that the piece just represented should be more extolled than many others which were of greater merit. By degrees I discovered the true motive of the general acclamation: it celebrated the triumph of my fulfilled engagement." Goldoni was now forty-three years of age. His invention had not yet fallen off, but he tried his strength too much. An illness was the consequence of this extraordinary exertion, and he felt the effects of it all his life after; yet during the ensuing season he brought out scarcely a smaller number, and, as he proceeded, attained a yet purer style of comedy; and he became the censor of the manners, and satirist of the follies, of his country. The peculiar system of what is called service, paid by gentlemen to the ladies of their choice, all over Italy, would have presented an ample field both for ridicule and reprehension, could he have ventured on it openly; but he was obliged to treat it with the same reserve, when bringing it on the stage, as is used when it is spoken of in society; and he could attack only the ridicule, not the real evils of the system. This comedy, called the "Villeggiatura," which turns on this subject, is particularly amusing; but it can scarcely be called an attack upon it. An Italian gentleman, returned lately from Paris, offers to serve a lady in the French manner: he is not to perform those thousand services required of the cavaliere servente, nor to attend on her, nor to be of any use or amusement to her: they are to be friends secretly; and, to preserve their friendship more sacredly, they must abstain from nearly all intercourse with each other. The lady, accustomed to be constantly waited upon, and to find in her cavaliere a resource against the ennui of solitude, is at a loss to understand the good that is to result from a negative of all the ordinary uses of friendship. The "Smanie della Villeggiatura" attacks another of the foibles of the Venetians. It is their custom, each autumn, to spend several weeks at their country seats; but, instead of this being a period of economy and retirement, it was the fashion to invite their friends, and to transport with them the dissipation of the city. Besides this, it being necessary, as a mark of fashion, to retire to a villa, those who were poor, and did not possess one, fancied themselves obliged to hire a house, and to go beyond their wealthier neighbours in the number of their guests and the splendour of their entertainments: nor can any idea be formed out of the country of the sort of fanaticism with which this custom was pursued; even to the bringing ruin on those who imagined themselves forced to so unnecessary an expense. Goldoni wrote three comedies on this subject: the first consisted in describing the preparations for the villeggiatura, or visit