illustrations of popular manners and sentiment, renders them more generally enjoyable; and they would have a wide European reputation were they not principally composed in the Venetian dialect. Turandot, in the translation, or rather imitation, of Schiller, is known wherever German literature extends; but the scarcely inferior merits of the Blue Monster, the Green Bird, and the like, have not in general induced foreigners to learn the Venetian patois.
Gozzi, in truth, just missed greatness; he had the artistic talent to work out a clever idea, but not the poetical fancy requisite to elevate this to a region of ideal beauty. As suggested by Symonds, his pieces would supply excellent material for operatic libretti. Tieck subsequently undertook the task with higher qualifications, but the favourable moment had gone by. Gozzi's plays are the true offspring of the national spirit, Tieck's merely importations. After four years of brilliant triumphs, Gozzi stopped short, fearing to fatigue the public taste, or conscious of having exhausted his vein. The remainder of his career as a dramatic author was chiefly occupied with adaptations from the Spanish.
While in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century the Comedy of Masks was decaying, a new form of drama was silently growing up, the operatic, "a thing," says Vernon Lee, "born of scenic displays and concerts, moulded into a romantic, wholly original shape, by the requirements of scenery, music, and singing." Its character as a literary production is indicated by the fact that its proper title of melodrama has become synonymous with something quite different, the prose tragedy which aims at strong sensational
