Note 78 — CARLO GOZZI. (continued 5)

Gratarol reports this letter, but expressly states that he was obliged by Signor Zon, secretary to the Inquisitors of State, to omit the words dimenticando il passato. His account of how he was compelled to sit down and scribble off the apology, while Zon stood over him, is very amusing. He taught his servant, on delivering the letter into Gozzi's hands, to repeat these words: "el mio paron xè stà comandà de scriverghe sto viglietto." In fact, Gratarol was forced by the supreme authority in Venice to send this apology, and refusal to do so would have involved his immediate imprisonment. According to his own confession, Gratarol, after hearing the ultimatum of the Supreme Tribunal, went to his writing-table and penned the above letter, expressing at the same time his readiness to kiss Count Gozzi's ... on the piazza, or to do anything else ridiculous which the Inquisitors might impose upon him. The Republic of S. Mark had reached the last stage of decrepitude, and well deserved to be swept into the lumber-room of bygone greatnesses, when Gratarol's and Gozzi's squabble about a woman and a play brought the machinery of state thus into action. Venice, always an artificial power (in the same sense as the Greek cities of antiquity were artificial), subsisting mainly upon commerce and on the tribute levied from dependencies, had in the eighteenth century dwindled into dotage, through lack of natural resources and revolutions in the world-trade. The rulers of Venice, reduced to insignificance among the powers of Europe, occupied their brains with parochial affairs and the contests of comedians. Op. cit., pp. 130-134.