, the passion for realising in himself some heroic
attitude which he admired, and the almost furious desire to reverse
completely his former habits of life, kept Alfieri up to the point of a
platonic connexion; and the Countess of Albany, intellectual, cold,
passive, easily moulded by a more vehement nature, loved Alfieri much
more with the head than with the heart, and loved in him just that which
made him prefer that they should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch
and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the Countess of Albany had much
more mind than personality, and that she was therefore mere wax in the
hands of a man who had become so exclusively and violently intellectual
as Alfieri: she had seen too much of the coarse realities of life, of
the brutal giving way to sensual impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the
deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this
as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all
contemporaries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri himself, whose
cynicism and truthfulness are equal, on the same footing as in
Florence.

And these months in Rome seem to have been the happiest months of
Alfieri's life, the happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess
of Albany. Alfieri hired the villa Strozzi, on the Esquiline, a small
palace built by one of Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, including
the use of furniture, stables, and garden, he paid the now incredibly
small sum of ten scudi a month, about two pounds of our money. Permitting
himself only two coats, the black one for the evening, and the famous
blue one for ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to one dish of
meat and vegetables, without wine or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make
the comparatively small pension paid to him by his sister, go almost
as far as had the fine fortune of which he had despoiled himself. He
spent lavishly on books, and more lavishly on horses, on horses which,
according to his own account, were his third passion, coming only after
his love for Mme. d'Albany, and sometimes usurping the place of his love
of literary glory.

The mania for systematic division of his time, the invincible tendency
to routine, which follows in most Italians after the disorder and
wastefulness of youth, had already got the better of Alfieri. He had,
almost at the moment when the passion for literature first disclosed
itself, made up his mind to write a definite number of tragedie