His plays, written especially for the dramatic troupe which he had taken under his paternal protection, and which he loved, cared for, watched over during twenty-five years of his life, are a strong and spicy satire upon the follies of the eighteenth century--a subtle and sagacious criticism of its universal immorality. Our humorist was greatly aided in the prosecution of his work by the sustained rectitude of his own life. With the naive confidence of a child he relates to us some of his strange experiences of men and of women--mostly of women--and we feel sorry when he is so cruelly and so unnecessarily deceived, and he must lose his implicit trust in that young prima donna in whose purity of soul he so unreservedly believed. How many years he had seen her, day after day, first as a mere girl, then as a young wife and a young mother, and always surrounding her with the homage of his admiration and of his respect! She appears like one of those enshrined figures one is surprised to find in out-of-the-way places, and which, after all, have to be left to other eyes. Gozzi came very near losing the dignity of his mental quietude--and that in spite of his mature age, for he was then nearly fifty--in a Don Quixotism well worthy of a man who had so deeply immersed his fancy in the fount of the Spanish drama, and whose head was filled with romantic adventures. A strange, an almost unaccountable, devotion bound him during five years to the erratic destiny of Ricci. Yet his affection for her did not go beyond a sustained solicitude for her welfare and an active interest in the development of her talent. For a long time he blindly believed in her moral capacities, and he went to work with the hope of winning her permanently to a pure and an elevated life. It is touching to watch him centring his whole interest and placing his paternal pride in that delusive will-o'-the-wisp glimmer of goodness which must inevitably lead hope astray. Gozzi broke off his friendship for her the day he found out she was less than he expected her to be. But this time he did not laugh, though he tells his readers that they may well laugh at him for his credulity, his childish, untaught experience, his romantic effort to believe in and to create an impossible ideal.