underlain this morbid and sombre passionateness; and we learn that when
he was still a tiny boy, having heard that the poisonous hemlock was a
sort of grass which brought death, and with no clear notion what death
was, but with a vague longing for it, he gorged himself with grass out
of the garden, in the belief that there would be some hemlock in it.

At school he learned nothing. The education given at the Academy of
Turin may, indeed, have been poor in quantity and quality; still it was
the best which a young Piedmontese nobleman could obtain, and Alfieri
himself confesses that of his school-fellows most came away with more
profit, and some afterwards became cultured and even learned men. He
learned nothing because he felt interest, emulation, curiosity about
nothing. His nature was still dull, dumb, dormant; and what he calls a
period of vegetation might more fitly be termed a moral and intellectual
hibernation. His school life is a weary, colourless, featureless part of
his autobiography. He would seem to have made neither friends nor
enemies. The tricks practised by or upon other school-boys are never
mentioned by him; never a practical joke, a lark, a scrape. Of his
intellectual tendencies, which were but little developed, we learn
only that he exchanged a copy of Ariosto, finally confiscated by the
authorities, for a certain number of helpings of chicken, relinquished
by him to its possessor; and that he bribed, with eatables also, a
certain other boy to tell him stories.

The one incident which sheds light upon the lad's morbid constitution
or condition, which reveals that strange, apathetic obstinacy, that
_vis inertiae_ which was the spring even of his most decided actions in
after life, and which at the same time raises grave doubts in my mind
whether there may not have been an actual taint of insanity in this
extraordinary being, is the incident of his having submitted, rather
than give in after some misdemeanour, to being confined to his room in
the Academy for nearly three months at a stretch. Alfieri was fifteen;
he might have been let loose for the asking, since there was no real
severity in the school. He slept nearly all day long, rose in the
evening, but refused to let himself be combed or dressed, and lay for
hours on a mattress before the fire, cooking a squalid meal of _polenta_
instead of his dinner, which he regularly sent down; receiving the
visits of his school-fellows without speaking or even