and might have realized a handsome competence had not mismanagement always kept him poor.
The personages of the pantomime, though of recent introduction in this country, are of almost immemorial antiquity in their native Italy. Their expressive gestures were the delight of the ancient Romans, and disarmed the gravity of statesmen and philosophers. Through the changing manners of successive centuries, their characters underwent various modifications. In later times Harlequin especially degenerated from his early sprightliness and humour, until the comic muse of Goldoni re-invested him with his present attractions. We present an extract on this subject from the memoirs of that entertaining writer, which, we feel assured, no reader will blame for its length.
"Comedy, which has at all times been the favourite spectacle of civilized nations, had shared the fate of the arts and sciences, and been swallowed up in the ruin of empires, and the decline of letters; but the germ of comedy was never quite extinct in the fertile imagination of the Italians. The first who laboured to revive it being disappointed, during a dark age, in skilful writers, had the boldness to compose plans, to divide them into acts and scenes, and to utter as impromptus, conversations, thoughts, and pleasantries which were previously concerted. Those who could read (and the rich were not of the number) observed that the comedies of Plautus and Terence always contained fathers who were dupes, debauched sons, amorous girls, lying valets, and corrupt maid-servants; and, traversing the different cantons of Italy, they took their fathers at Venice and Bologna, their valets at Bergamo, their enamoured youths and maids, and their soubrettes in the states of Rome and Tuscany.
"We must not wait for written proofs of this reasoning, because we are speaking of an age in which writing was
