ove it may be called), which
had ever and anon broken the monotony of his aimless life. Of these
ignominies the one he had felt most, perhaps because it deprived him of
the independence which even in his stupidest times he put his pride in,
was the ignominy of love; that is to say, of what love was to him,
unworthy incapacity of doing without a woman whom he despised and even
occasionally hated. The very fits of moral hysterics, nay, of moral St.
Vitus's dance, of which such love maladies largely consisted, sickened
him, degraded him in his own eyes like some disgusting physical infirmity.
In his twenty-second year he had such a love malady, he had been the
scandal of all London in an intrigue with a certain very lovely Lady
Ligonier, who, divorced by her husband for her guilt with the young
Italian, was on the point of being joyfully taken to wife by Alfieri when
it came out that before being his mistress she had been the mistress
of her own groom; a termination of the adventure which, much as it
distressed the writer of Alfieri's autobiography, is extremely
satisfactory to the reader. A few years later, after a variety of minor
love affairs, he became entangled at Turin in the nets of a Marchesa di
Prie, a rather faded Armida of very tarnished reputation, and whom
he thoroughly despised and even disliked at the very height of his
attachment. The struggles between his sense of weariness and degradation
and his unworthy love for this woman half wore him out, and brought on a
severe malady, from which he recovered only to swear he would never
enter her house again, and to return to it as soon as he could stand on
his feet. The beautiful social customs of eighteenth-century Italy
authorised and even imposed upon a man who had accepted the position of
_cavaliere servente_ (a sort of pseudo-platonic vice-husbandship which
covered illicit connections with a worldly propriety) to attend upon his
lady from the moment of her getting up in the morning to the moment when
she returned home or dismissed her guests at night, with only a few
intervals during which the lover might have his meals or pay his visits;
so, when the Marchesa di Prie fell ill of a malady which required
absolute repose and silence, Alfieri was bound to spend the whole
morning seated at the foot of her bed. During one of these weary
watches, it came into his head to kill time by scribbling some dramatic
scenes on loose sheets of paper, which he hid during the in