What makes Gozzi's memoirs so interesting is, above all, their vitality. A fresh, bounding current of life runs through them, and while watching it you take no notice of those _debris_ of character which an austere moralist would surely count up and remember. In the midst of extreme licentiousness, Gozzi endeavored to awaken in the Venetians a sense of the dignity of existence by placing before their eyes tangible ideas of virtue. The public is a materialist by right of usage, and therefore prefers the reality of the theatre to all other forms of teaching or of amusement. Rouge and tinsel have the gift of persuasion. Gozzi felt that instinctively, and few play-writers have been more successful as an influence than he was. At the avenue of every new sensation, and gifted with a quick-catching sense of gayety, he lost nothing of the play which men and women enacted before him. He observed, he listened carefully: nothing escaped the grasp of his constructive and fanciful mind. His daily walks through the most populous streets; his habitual lingering around the fashionable shops where pretty modistes attracted the idle admiration of idlers; his morning visit to the Rialto, and his never-failing appearance on the Piazza when everybody was assembled there in the afternoon,--these were the varied sources of his study of his contemporaries and also of his dramatic inspiration. Though at that time there were several playhouses in Venice, and going to the theatre was then, as it is now, the favorite way of spending the evening, no theatre was so well patronized and so crowded as that of San Samuele, where Venetian nobles and high-born women dazzled the eye of the people with their splendor, while an unbounded admiration welcomed some new play from the well-known, the genial and much-loved Count Carlo Gozzi. And yet, reading these same plays, may we not somewhat wonder at the extravagant praise that was showered upon them in those far-off days? They are sketchy, sparkling, interesting by their movement and color. Like a piece of faceted glass they catch and radiate light. But they are not distinguished by any originality of thought nor by a profound and far-reaching philosophy. They are society-studies, an exact portraying of what was considered _le beau monde_. Gozzi had too much common sense and too much honesty of nature not to be very much shocked by the avowed cynicism which it was the fashion then to parade. He takes pains to aim against it the full and spicy expression of his disfavor, considering it as a fatal outgrowth of French infidelity. Therefore he deserves to be considered a moral writer. The freedom of his language is only the seal of realism affixed to his writings, such as we find it in Shakespeare. Nothing could be more unlike and dissimilar in the after-taste which they leave on the mental palate than these very plays which we are considering and any French play of our own time. In Gozzi the moralist