The night arrived; the theatre was full from parterre to gallery; the boxes presented a truly brilliant spectacle.  The curtain went up, and the play began.

I shall only say of Artaserse that La Panormita was the Aspasia of the piece, and Belviso the Berenice, her foster-sister and companion.  My role was that of the Messenger, and only gave me one long speech, recounting the miraculous preservation of Artaspe and Spiridate, sons of King Artaserse and lovers of the two ladies; the treachery, discovery, and violent end of Dario—­in fact, the untying of the knot firmly twisted in the third act.  The audience paid visits, talked, laughed, played faro, so far as I could learn, throughout the play.  Nor do I wonder at it, for not the finest acting in the world could have galvanised into life any one link of its dreary chain.  When the curtain was raised; however, upon the second piece, there was a perceptible settling down to listen, behold, and be amused.  Tragedy was the fashion, and must be endured, but all the Italians loved the masks.

The Donne Furlane was the piece, a comedy of art as they call it here—­ or, as we say, a comedy of masks—­wherein the stock characters of Harlequin, Columbine, Brighella and Pantalone are given a rag of a plot, and are expected to embroider that with follies, drolleries and obscenities according as their humour of the moment may dictate.  The persons who give the title to this particular farce—­the Donne Furlane—­ are the lowest class of Venetian women, and their ceremonious name implies what we in England imply when we speak of the nymphs of Drury Lane or the sirens of Radcliffe Highway, calling them, in fact, exactly what they are not.  According to the plot of the play, Pantalone is an old merchant of Rimini who arrives in Venice with his family.  Colombina is his daughter, and was played, of course, by Belviso; Arlecchino and Brighella are his simpleton sons—­they were the manager and myself.  Il Nanno was Punchinello, his Neapolitan servant, Il Dottore his travelling physician.  They come ashore in the quarter of the Furlani, and all the zest of the play lies in the equivoque which contrasts the knavery of the inhabitants with the naivete of the visitors.  Pantalone’s family is fair game.  A bully called Truffaldino poses as a marchese and wins the affections of Colombina; Brighella is entrapped by a Donna Furlana into a promise of marriage; the Dottore finds himself engaged to cure half a dozen of the same sort of ladies of the maladies incident to their career; finally, Pantalone is claimed as their long-lost uncle, who was supposed to have abandoned them in their days of infant orphanage.  Such promise of diversion as this imbroglio had, it was rendered still more to the taste of the audience by the license which the actors allowed themselves.  Belviso was perfection as the simple country girl; one could hardly credit a lad of his age with such niceness of observation, such humorous yet whimsical