The memoirs of Alfieri and Goldoni are not deficient in any of the characteristics of good autobiography.  They seem to bear upon their face the stamp of truthfulness, they illustrate their authors’ lives with marvellous lucidity, and they are full of interest as stories.  But it is to the contrast which they present that our attention should be chiefly drawn.  Other biographies may be as interesting and amusing.  None show in a more marked manner two distinct natures endowed with genius for one art, and yet designed in every possible particular for different branches of that art.  Alfieri embodies Tragedy; Goldoni is the spirit of Comedy.  They are both Italians:  their tragedies and comedies are by no means cosmopolitan; but this national identity of character only renders more remarkable the individual divergences by which they were impelled into their different paths.  Thalia seems to have made the one, body, soul, and spirit; and Melpomene the other; each goddess launched her favourite into circumstances suited to the evolution of his genius, and presided over his development, so that at his death she might exclaim,—­Behold the living model of my Art!

Goldoni was born at Venice in the year 1707; he had already reached celebrity when Alfieri saw the light for the first time, in 1749, at Asti.  Goldoni’s grandfather was a native of Modena, who had settled in Venice, and there lived with the prodigality of a rich and ostentatious ‘bourgeois.’  ’Amid riot and luxury did I enter the world,’ says the poet, after enumerating the banquets and theatrical displays with which the old Goldoni entertained his guests in his Venetian palace and country-house.  Venice at that date was certainly the proper birthplace for a comic poet.  The splendour of the Renaissance had thoroughly habituated her nobles to pleasures of the sense, and had enervated their proud, maritime character, while the great name of the republic robbed them of the caution for which they used to be conspicuous.  Yet the real strength of Venice was almost spent, and nothing remained but outward insolence and prestige.  Everything was gay about Goldoni in his earliest childhood.  Puppet-shows were built to amuse him by his grandfather.  ’My mother,’ he says, ’took charge of my education, and my father of my amusements.’  Let us turn to the opening scene in Alfieri’s life, and mark the difference.  A father above sixty, ’noble, wealthy, and respectable,’ who died before his son had reached the age of one year old.  A mother devoted to religion, the widow of one marquis, and after the death of a second husband, Alfieri’s father, married for the third time to a nobleman of ancient birth.  These were Alfieri’s parents.  He was born in a solemn palazzo in the country town of Asti, and at the age of five already longed for death as an escape from disease and other earthly troubles.  So noble and so wealthy was the youthful poet that an abbe was engaged to carry out his education, but not to teach him more than