in ’Don Giovanni,’ where Leporello personates the Don and deceives Donna Elvira.  Goldoni had often noticed a beautiful young lady at church and on the public drives:  she was attended by a waiting-maid, who soon perceived that her mistress had excited the young man’s admiration, and who promised to befriend him in his suit.  Goldoni was told to repair at night to the palace of his mistress, and to pour his passion forth beneath her window.  Impatiently he waited for the trysting hour, conned his love-sentences, and gloried in the romance of the adventure.  When night came, he found the window, and a veiled figure of a lady in the moonlight, whom he supposed at once to be his mistress.  Her he eloquently addressed in the true style of Romeo’s rapture, and she answered him.  Night after night this happened, but sometimes he was a little troubled by a sound of ill-suppressed laughter interrupting the tete-a-tete.  Meanwhile Teresa, the waiting-maid, received from his hands costly presents for her mistress, and made him promises on her part in exchange.  As she proved unable to fulfil them, Goldoni grew suspicious, and at last discovered that the veiled figure to whom he had poured out his tale of love was none other than Teresa, and that the laughter had proceeded from her mistress, whom the faithless waiting-maid regaled at her lover’s expense.  Thus ended this ridiculous matter.  Goldoni was not, however, cured by his experience.  One other love-affair rendered Udine too hot to hold him, and in consequence of a third he had to fly from Venice just when he was beginning to flourish there.  At length he married comfortably and suitably, settling down into a quiet life with a woman whom, if he did not love her with passion, he at least respected and admired.  Goldoni, in fact, had no real passion in his nature.

Alfieri, on the other hand, was given over to volcanic ebullitions of the most ungovernable hate and affection, joy and sorrow.  The chains of love which Goldoni courted so willingly, Alfieri regarded with the greatest shyness.  But while Goldoni healed his heart of all its bruises in a week or so, the tragic poet bore about him wounds that would not close.  He enumerates three serious passions which possessed his whole nature, and at times deprived him almost of his reason.  A Dutch lady first won his heart, and when he had to leave her, Alfieri suffered so intensely that he never opened his lips during the course of a long journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Piedmont.  Fevers, and suicides attempted but interrupted, marked the termination of this tragic amour.  His second passion had for its object an English lady, with whose injured husband he fought a duel, although his collarbone was broken at the time.  The lady proved unworthy of Alfieri as well as of her husband, and the poet left her in a most deplorable state of hopelessness and intellectual prostration.  At last he formed a permanent affection for the wife of Prince Charles