Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meagre
summary, of the book known as "THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA"; a work
absolutely unique in literature. He who opens these wonderful pages is as
one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a
stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. The curtain draws up,
and suddenly a hundred and fifty years are rolled away, and in bright
light stands out before us the whole life of the past; the gay dresses,
the polished wit, the careless morals, and all the revel and dancing of
those merry years before the mighty deluge of the Revolution. The palaces
and marble stairs of old Venice are no longer desolate, but thronged with
scarlet-robed senators, prisoners with the doom of the Ten upon their
heads cross the Bridge of Sighs, at dead of night the nun slips out of
the convent gate to the dark canal where a gondola is waiting, we assist
at the 'parties fines' of cardinals, and we see the bank made at faro.
Venice gives place to the assembly rooms of Mrs. Cornely and the fast
taverns of the London of 1760; we pass from Versailles to the Winter
Palace of St. Petersburg in the days of Catherine, from the policy of the
Great Frederick to the lewd mirth of strolling-players, and the
presence-chamber of the Vatican is succeeded by an intrigue in a garret.
It is indeed a new experience to read this history of a man who,
refraining from nothing, has concealed nothing; of one who stood in the
courts of Louis the Magnificent before Madame de Pompadour and the nobles
of the Ancien Regime, and had an affair with an adventuress of Denmark
Street, Soho; who was bound over to keep the peace by Fielding, and knew
Cagliostro. The friend of popes and kings and noblemen, and of all the
male and female ruffians and vagabonds of Europe, abbe, soldier,
charlatan, gamester, financier, diplomatist, viveur, philosopher,
virtuoso, "chemist, fiddler, and buffoon," each of these, and all of
these was Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt, Knight of the Golden