fly from this new love while it was still possible to do so?

The grave and virtuous Gori answered that he should not: this new love
had been sent to him as a cure for all baser loves; instead of crushing
it as an obstacle to his higher life and his glory, he should thankfully
cultivate it as an incentive and assistance in working out his
intellectual redemption.

Let us pause, and consider for a moment the meaning of Alfieri's
question, and the meaning of Gori's answer; let us try and realise the
ideas and feelings of two honourable men, seeking a higher life, in a
country so near our own as Italy, and so short a while ago as the year
1777. Here was Alfieri, passionately desirous to redeem his own
existence by intellectual efforts, and confident of a vague mission to
awaken his countrymen to his own nobler feelings: to the contempt of
sensual pleasures and worldly vanities, the hatred of political and
religious servitude, the love of truth and justice, the love of Italy.
Here was this Alfieri, at the very outset of his new career, solemnly
confiding to his kindest and wisest friend the scruples, the fears,
which restrained him from seeking the company of a woman whom he was
beginning to love, and who was beginning to love him, a young woman
married by mere worldly convention to a sickly, brutal, and brutish
drunkard, old enough to be her father. And what were these scruples?
Merely that a new love might distract Alfieri from his plans of study
and work, that a woman might cheat him of glory, and Italy of the tragic
drama which would school her to virtue. That there could be any other
scruples appears never to have crossed Alfieri's brain: that there could
be any reason to pause and ask himself whether he was doing wrong or ill
before exposing to temptation the woman whom he loved, and the honour
which he loved more than her; whether he had a right to return to the
palace of Charles Edward and, while receiving his hospitality, while
enjoying his confidence, to teach the wife of his host how to love
another man than her husband; whether he had a right to return to the
presence of that beautiful and intellectual lady, who had hitherto
suffered only from the brutishness of her husband, and add to these
sufferings the sufferings of hopeless love, the sufferings of a guilty
conscience?

But to the Italian of the eighteenth century, even to the man who most
thoroughly despised and loathed his country's and century's corrup