a count should know.  Except this worthy man he had no companions whatever.  Strange ideas possessed the boy.  He ruminated on his melancholy, and when eight years old attempted suicide.  At this age he was sent to the academy at Turin, attended, as befitted a lad of his rank, by a man-servant, who was to remain and wait on him at school.  Alfieri stayed here several years without revisiting his home, tyrannised over by the valet who added to his grandeur, constantly subject to sickness, and kept in almost total ignorance by his incompetent preceptors.  The gloom and pride and stoicism of his temperament were augmented by this unnatural discipline.  His spirit did not break, but took a haughtier and more disdainful tone.  He became familiar with misfortunes.  He learned to brood over and intensify his passions.  Every circumstance of his life seemed strung up to a tragic pitch.  This at least is the impression which remains upon our mind after reading in his memoirs the narrative of what must in many of its details have been a common schoolboy’s life at that time.

Meanwhile, what had become of young Goldoni?  His boyhood was as thoroughly plebeian, various, and comic as Alfieri’s had been patrician, monotonous, and tragical.  Instead of one place of residence, we read of twenty.  Scrape succeeds to scrape, adventure to adventure.  Knowledge of the world, and some book learning also, flow in upon the boy, and are eagerly caught up by him and heterogeneously amalgamated in his mind.  Alfieri learned nothing, wrote nothing, in his youth, and heard his parents say—­’A nobleman need never strive to be a doctor of the faculties.’  Goldoni had a little medicine and much law thrust upon him.  At eight he wrote a comedy, and ere long began to read the plays of Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, and Machiavelli.  Between the nature of the two poets there was a marked and characteristic difference as to their mode of labour and of acquiring knowledge.  Both of them loved fame, and wrought for it; but Alfieri did so from a sense of pride and a determination to excel; while Goldoni loved the approbation of his fellows, sought their compliments, and basked in the sunshine of smiles.  Alfieri wrote with labour.  Each tragedy he composed went through a triple process of composition, and received frequent polishing when finished.  Goldoni dashed off his pieces with the greatest ease on every possible subject.  He once produced sixteen comedies in one theatrical season.  Alfieri’s were like lion’s whelps—­brought forth with difficulty, and at long intervals; Goldoni’s, like the brood of a hare—­many, frequent, and as agile as their parent.  Alfieri amassed knowledge scrupulously, but with infinite toil.  He mastered Greek and Hebrew when he was past forty.  Goldoni never gave himself the least trouble to learn anything, but trusted to the ready wit, good memory, and natural powers, which helped him in a hundred strange emergencies.  Power of will and pride sustained the one; facility