s completely
neutralised. Of all the various persons who speak of the extraordinary
friendship between Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d'Albany which existed at
this time, not one even ventures to hint that the relations between
them exceeded in the slightest degree the limits of mere passionate
friendship; and the solemn words of Alfieri, in whom truthfulness was
not merely an essential part of his natural character, but an even more
essential part of his self-idealised personality, merely confirm the
words of all contemporary writers. Now, if there was a country where an
intrigue between a woman noted for her virtue and a poet noted for his
eccentricity would, had it existed, have been joyfully laid hold of by
gossip, it was certainly this utterly-demoralised Italy of _cavalieri
serventi_: every fashionable woman and every fast man would have felt a
personal satisfaction in tearing to pieces the reputation of a lady
whose whole character and life had been a censure upon theirs. But, as
there are women the intensity of whose pure-mindedness, felt in every
feature and gesture and word, paralyses even the most ribald wish to
shock or outrage, and momentarily drags up towards themselves the very
people who would dearly love to drag them down even for a second; so
also it would appear that there are situations so strange, meetings of
individuals so exceptional, that calumny itself is unable to attack
them. No one said a word against Alfieri and the Countess; and Charles
Edward himself, jealous as he was of any kind of interference in his
concerns, appears never to have attempted to rid himself of his wife's
new friend.

Much, of course, must be set down to the very madness of the Pretender's
jealousy, to his more than Oriental systematic guarding and watching of
his wife. Mann, we must remember, had written, long before Alfieri
appeared upon the scene, that Charles Edward never went out without his
wife and never let her go out without him; he barricaded her apartment,
and was never further off than the next room. Charles Edward undoubtedly
conferred upon two people, living in a day of excessive looseness of
manners, the inestimable advantage of confining their love within the
bounds of friendship, of crushing all that might have been base, of
liberating all that could be noble, of turning what might have been
merely a passion after the pattern of Rousseau into a passion after the
pattern of Dante. But what Charles Edward coul