Academy, and at its close attracted all attention to himself by his clever improvisation.  He was in truth a ready-witted man, pliable, full of resource, bred half a valet, half a Roman graeculus.  Alfieri saw more of Europe than Goldoni.  France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, Spain, all parts of Italy he visited with restless haste.  From land to land he flew, seeking no society, enjoying nothing, dashing from one inn door to another with his servants and his carriages, and thinking chiefly of the splendid stud of horses which he took about with him upon his travels.  He was a lonely, stiff, self-engrossed, indomitable man.  He could not rest at home:  he could not bear to be the vassal of a king and breathe the air of courts.  So he lived always on the wing, and ended by exiling himself from Sardinia in order to escape the trammels of paternal government.  As for his tragedies, he wrote them to win laurels from posterity.  He never cared to see them acted; he bullied even his printers and correctors; he cast a glove down in defiance of his critics.  Goldoni sought the smallest meed of approbation.  It pleased him hugely in his old age to be Italian master to a French princess.  Alfieri openly despised the public.  Goldoni wrote because he liked to write; Alfieri, for the sake of proving his superior powers.  Against Alfieri’s hatred of Turin and its trivial solemnities, we have to set Goldoni’s love of Venice and its petty pleasures.  He would willingly have drunk chocolate and played at dominoes or picquet all his life on the Piazza di San Marco, when Alfieri was crossing the sierras on his Andalusian horse, and devouring a frugal meal of rice in solitude.  Goldoni glided through life an easy man, with genial, venial thoughts; with a clear, gay, gentle temper; a true sense of what is good and just; and a heart that loved diffusively, if not too warmly.  Many were the checks and obstacles thrown on his path; but round them or above them he passed nimbly, without scar or scathe.  Poverty went close behind him, but he kept her off, and never felt the pinch of need.  Alfieri strained and strove against the barriers of fate; a sombre, rugged man, proud, candid, and self-confident, who broke or bent all opposition; now moving solemnly with tragic pomp, now dashing passionately forward by the might of will.  Goldoni drew his inspirations from the moment and surrounding circumstances.  Alfieri pursued an ideal, slowly formed, but strongly fashioned and resolutely followed.  Of wealth he had plenty and to spare, but he disregarded it, and was a Stoic in his mode of life.  He was an unworldly man, and hated worldliness.  Goldoni, but for his authorship, would certainly have grown a prosperous advocate, and died of gout in Venice.  Goldoni liked smart clothes; Alfieri went always in black.  Goldoni’s fits of spleen—­for he was melancholy now and then—­lasted a day or two, and disappeared before a change of place.  Alfieri dragged his discontent about with him all over