Venice during the eighty years of Gozzi's life was the Venice of unprincipled, corrupt men and women. It had become a masked ball, a mad pleasure-place, where intrigue and adventure gave the chief interest to each day. In art, in letters and in the conduct of life the most frivolous or trivial or fleeting occupations engaged the attention and absorbed the time. The old men forgot the dignity of their age in a puerile leisure, and the young men were dissipated and purposeless. People had nothing to do but to laugh at each other and to play with the passing moment; and the loss of all sense of moral responsibility left them adrift in the midst of the most glorious of national memories. One has to wonder at the strange indifference which settled over those descendants of the illustrious men whose names are built into the magnificent palaces on both sides of the Grand Canal; and there is perhaps no greater lesson than that which may be learnt from studying the private history of the noble patrician families of Venice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--men whose hearts were opened to all great emotions--and by looking at the marionette life of the men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as it is portrayed in the pictures of Longhi, where the _Chamber of Sighs_ never empties itself of the opulent gamblers who patronized the Ridotto night and day. When Gozzi was a young man his first initiation into life had been a repeated experience of the playful capriciousness of the sex, and he never forgot it. What a commentary on the fair Venetians is his remark, "I do not admit the possibility for a woman to know love"! In his eyes she remains a being incapable of any grand and sustained sacrifice of her instincts to the ennobling mastery of moral responsibility. In all his dramas, plays and comedies there is but one character of a woman which is at all magnetic or lovable--that of Angela, the heroine of the play of the _Deer Ring_. It is a pleasure to meet at last that gentle and guileless feminine personality after you have wearied of the tinsel flimsiness, the bubbling frivolity, the sparkling emptiness of the society-women who so turned the head of the age in which they lived, and have so scandalously immortalized it. Goldoni and Gozzi have both given us plays which show us that scandal and intrigue were the favorite seasoning of the stale stuff of Venetian life after it had lost its religion and its patriotic ideal. Triviality for triviality, we prefer Gozzi. As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, Here on earth they bore their fruitage: mirth and folly were the crop. What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop? H. M. BENSON. HEINE. BUCH DER LIEDER. Pain brings us more than pleasure; Tears comfort more than wine; Grief's hands are full of treasure, And sorrow is divine.