s, first
twelve, then fourteen, and no more; and to devote a certain number of
years to the elaborate process of first constructing them mentally, then
of writing them full length in prose, and finally of turning this prose
into verse; and he was later to devise a corresponding plan of writing
an equally fixed number of comedies and satires in an equally fixed
number of years, after which, as we have seen, he was to give up his
thoughts, having attained the age of forty-five, to preparing for death.

This routine is a national characteristic, and absorbs many an Italian,
turning all the poetry of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful
inevitableness; but Alfieri did not merely submit to routine, he enjoyed
it, he devised and carried it out with all the ferocity of his nature.
To this man, who cared so much for the figure he cut, and so little for
all the things which surrounded him, a life reduced to absolute monotony
of grinding work was almost an object of aesthetic pleasure, almost
an object of sensual delight: he enjoyed a dead level, an endless
white-washed wall, as much as other men, and especially other poets,
enjoy the ups and downs, the irregularities and mottled colours of
existence. So Alfieri arranged for himself, in his house near Santa
Maria Maggiore, what to him was a life of exquisite delightfulness.

He spent the whole early morning reading the Latin and Italian classics,
and grinding away at his tragedies, which, after repeated sketching out,
repeated writing out in prose, were now going through the most elaborate
process of writing, re-writing, revising, and re-revising in verse.
Then, before resuming his solitary studies in the afternoon, he would
have one of his many horses saddled, and ride about in the desolate
tracts of the town, which in papal times extended from Santa Maria
Maggiore to the Porta Pia, the Porta San Lorenzo, and St. John Lateran:
miles of former villa gardens, with quincunxes and flower-beds, cut up
for cabbage-growing, wide open spaces where the wall of a temple, the
arch of an aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the
rank grass, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and
plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of
vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green
serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed
walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the
fe