f life had raged and roared in the chains of unworthy love.
And she, she also, was quite a different woman from the Lady Ligonier
and from the Marchesa di Prie, the shameless, unfaithful wives, and
heartless, vain, worldly coquettes who had made such havoc of his heart.
She was a cold, virtuous, extremely intellectual woman, trying to
find consolation for her quietly and bravely supported miseries in
study, in abstract interests which should take away her thoughts from
the sickening reality of things; a woman who would be valuable as a
friend to a poet, and who would know how to value his friendship. And
he, continually seeking for people who could understand his literary
ambitions, with whom he could discuss all his poetical projects, and
from whom he might receive assistance in this new intellectual life,
was he not in need of such a friendship? Would he not appreciate its
usefulness and uniqueness sufficiently to see that it did not turn to a
mere useless and demoralising love affair? There may also have been
something very reassuring to Alfieri's apprehensions in the knowledge
that he would be dealing, not with an Italian woman, accustomed and
almost socially obliged to hold a man in the degrading bonds of
cicisbeism, but with a foreigner, the jealously-guarded wife of a sort
of legendary ogre, with whom, however much the old fury of love might
awaken in him, there could by no possibility be anything beyond the most
strictly watched friendship. So Alfieri went to the palace of the Count
of Albany; and, having once been, returned there.

The palace bought by Charles Edward about 1776 stands in the most remote
and peaceful quarter of Florence. A few quiet streets, unbroken by
shop-fronts and unfrequented by vehicles, lead up to that quarter;
streets of low white-washed convent walls overtopped by trees, of silent
palaces, of unpretending little houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth
century, from behind whose iron window-gratings and blistered green
shutters one expects even now, as one passes in the silence of the
summer afternoons, to hear the faint jangle of some harpsichord-strummed
minuet, the turns and sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song by
Cimarosa or Paisiello. It is a region of dead walls, over which bend
the acacias and elms, over which shoot up the cypresses and cedars
of innumerable convent and palace-gardens, on whose flower-beds and
fountains and quincunxes the first-floor windows look down. In