the rich plebeian must drag her costly skirts in the dust; and the
nobility of our hero's lady is honored by the flunkeys who lift her
train as she enters the house. The hostess, seated on a sofa, receives
her guests with a few murmured greetings, and then abandons herself to
the arduous task of arranging the various partners at cards. When the
cavalier serves his lady at supper, he takes his handkerchief from his
pocket and spreads it on her lap; such usages and the differences of
costume distinguished an evening party at Milan then from the like joy
in our time and country.


IV

The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was
not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at
Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds
that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His
father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school
in Milan, where his scholarship was not equal to his early literary
promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with
people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the
Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure,
and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in
noble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others),
in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life
he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already
supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also,
at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and
had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one's
copyright was good for nothing across the border--scarcely a fair