ld give it, among the
convent-educated, early corrupted, frivolous ladies of Italy, to whom
love-making was the highest interest in life, but an interest only a
trifle higher than card-playing, dancing, or dressing? Where, even among
the very small number of women like Silvia Verza at Verona, Isabella
Albrizzi at Venice, or Paolina Castiglione at Milan, who actually had
some amount of culture, and actually prided themselves on it? The rank
and file of Italian ladies could give him only another Marchesa di Prie,
a little better or a little worse, another woman who would degrade
him in the sensual and inane routine of a _cicisbeo_. The exceptional
ladies were even worse. Fancy this morbid, conceited, self-doubtful,
violent, moody Alfieri accepting literary sympathy in a room full of
small provincial lions--sympathy which had to be divided with half a
dozen others; learned persons who edited Latin inscriptions, dapper
poet priestlets, their pockets crammed with sonnets on ladies' hats,
opera-singers, canary birds, births, deaths, and marriages, and
ponderous pedants of all sorts and descriptions. Why, a lady who set
up as the muse of a hot-tempered and brow-beating creature like
Alfieri, a man whom consciousness of imperfect education made horribly
sensitive--such a lady would have lost all the accustomed guests of her
_salon_ in ten days' time. Herein, therefore, consisted the uniqueness
of the Countess of Albany, in the fact that she was everything to
Alfieri, which no other woman could be. Originally better educated than
her Italian contemporaries, the ex-canoness of Mons, half-Flemish,
half-German by family, French by training, and connected with England
through her marriage with the Pretender, had the advantage of open
doors upon several fields of culture. She could read the books of four
different nations--a very rare accomplishment in her day; and she was,
moreover, one of those women, rarer even in the eighteenth century than
now-a-days, whose nature, while unproductive in any particular line, is
intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, and in the intellectual
domain even more intensely and almost exclusively literary--women who
are born readers, to whom a new poem is as great an excitement as a new
toilette, a treatise of philosophy (we shall see the Countess devouring
Kant long before he had been heard of out of Germany) more exquisitely
delightful than a symphony. And this woman, thus educated, with this
im