tion,
no such scruple ever came. What consideration need any man or any woman
waste upon a husband? What possible disgrace could come to a woman
in having a lover? And did not the frantic jealousy of the besotted
old husband, his continual attendance, his perpetual spying, most
effectually remove any further consideration there might be for him?

I scarcely know whether it is a thing about which to be cheerful or sad,
proud or ashamed; but the more one studies the ideas and feelings of
even one's nearest neighbours, in place or in time, the more is one
impressed with the sense that, say what people choose, men and women do
not think and feel, even upon the most important subjects, in anything
like a uniform manner. Social misarrangements, which are crimes towards
the individual, are invariably partially righted, made endurable, by
individual rearrangements, which are crimes towards society. The woman
was not consulted by her parents before her marriage, she was not
restrained by her conscience afterwards; she was given for ambition to a
man whose tenure of her received legal and religious sanction; she gave
herself for love to a man whose possession of her was against society
and against religion; but society received her to its parties, and the
Church gave her its communion. And thus, in Italy, and in the eighteenth
century, where no one had found any fault at a girl of nineteen being
married by proxy to a man who turned out to be a disgusting and brutal
sot; no one also could find any fault at a young man of twenty-eight
seeking, and obtaining, the love of a married woman of twenty-five. The
immoral law had produced the immoral lawlessness. So, to the scruples
of Alfieri, Francesco Gori had answered: "Return to Florence."

We shall now see how, out of this vile piece of prose, the higher nature
of Alfieri and of the Countess of Albany, and (what a satire upon poetic
and platonic affection!) most of all, the monomaniac jealousy of Charles
Edward, contrived to make a sort of poetry.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ESCAPE.

Alfieri's fears had been groundless. His love for the wife of Charles
Edward Stuart--a love, he tells us, quite different from any he had
previously experienced, quiet, pure, and solemn--was destined not to
interfere with that austere process of detaching his soul from the base
passions of the world, and devoting it to the creation of a new style
of poetry, to the achievement of a new kind of glory;