But Vittorio
Alfieri was nevertheless one of the least happy of little boys, and one
of the least happy of young men. He was born with an uncomfortable
and awkward and unwieldy character, as some men are born lame, or
scrofulous, or dyspeptic. The child of a father over sixty, and of a
very young mother; there was in him some indefinable imperfection of
nature, some jar of character, or some great want, some original sin of
mental constitution, which made him different from other men, disabled
him from getting pleasure or profit out of the circumstances which gave
pleasure or profit to them; and turned his youth into a long period of
mental weakness and suffering, from which he recovered, indeed, by a
system of moral and intellectual cold water, meagre diet, and excessive
exercise, but only to remain for the rest of his days in a condition
of character absolutely analogous to the bodily condition of those
self-martyring invalids, who keep the gout down by taking exhausting
walks, eating next to no dinner, and filling the lives of others with
their excitable cantankerousness and gloomy forebodings. There was a
numbness and yet a sort of over-sensitiveness about his youth; a
strangeness which, without giving the least promise of superior genius,
merely made him less happy than other lads.

The word numbness returns to my mind in connexion with this young
Alfieri; it certainly does not express the exact impressions left in me
by his own narrative of his boyhood and youth, and yet I can find no
better word: there was in him something like those irregularities of the
circulation due to dyspepsia, which, while making some part of the body,
say the head, throb and ache at the least sound, yet leave the whole man
dull, heavy, only half-awake.

As a child he had vague and wistful cravings, untempered, unbeautified
by such imaginative visions as usually accompany the eccentric feelings
of such children as are subject to them. Obstinate and taciturn, he
tells us of the curious passion which he experienced for the little
choristers, boys of twelve or thirteen, whom he saw serving mass, or
heard singing the responses, in the Carmine Church at Asti. Silently,
painfully, he seems to have yearned for them in solitude; the daily
visit to the church where they shone out in their white surplices,
being the only pleasure in this black, blind little life of seven or
eight. Some physical ailment, some want of change and movement may have