A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the wildest of romances, written down with the exactitude of a business diary; a view of men and cities from Naples to Berlin, from Madrid and London to Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the ‘vie intime’ of the eighteenth century depicted¹ by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals² and saluted³ crowned heads, and to morrow lurked⁴ in dens⁵ of profligacy⁶ and crime; a book of confessions⁷ penned without reticence⁸ and without penitence⁹; a record of forty years of “occult” charlatanism¹⁰; a collection of tales of successful imposture¹², of ‘bonnes fortunes’, of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity¹³, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate wit of Voltaire. Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the life of the past, who would not cry, “Where can such a book as this be found?”

Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meagre summary, of the book known as “THE MEMOIRS¹⁴ 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

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