tage
in the Spanish palace was very great. A young man, half lay, half
ecclesiastic, a dubious sort of poet, secretary, factotum, accustomed to
write not the most sincere poetry, and to execute, perhaps, not the most
creditable errands, of the Pope's dubious nephew, Duke Braschi--a young
man named Vincenzo Monti, was present at this performance, or one
of the succeeding ones; and from that moment became the author of the
revolutionary tragedy of _Aristodemo_, the potential author of that
famous ode on the battle of Marengo, one of the forerunners of new
Italy. Nay, even when, some few months later, there died at Vienna the
old Abate Metastasio, and his death brought home to a rather forgetful
world what a poet and what a dramatist that old Metastasio had been;
even then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a worldly priest, a quasi
prelate, the Abate Taruffi, could find no better winding up for the
funeral oration, delivered before all the pedants and prigs and fops and
spies of pontifical Rome assembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy,
than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and prophesy that Metastasio
had found a successor greater than himself.

CHAPTER XI.

SEPARATION.

Alfieri and the Countess were happy, happier, perhaps, than at any
other time of their lives; but this happiness had to be paid for. The
false position in which, however faultlessly, they were placed; the
illegitimate affection in which, however blamelessly, they were
indulging; these things, offensive to social institutions, although in
no manner wrong in themselves, had produced their fruit of humiliation,
nay, of degradation. Fate is more of a Conservative than we are apt to
think; it resents the efforts of any individual, be he as blameless
as possible, to resist for his own comfort and satisfaction the
uncomfortable and unsatisfactory arrangements of the world; it punishes
the man who seeks to elude an unjust law by condemning him to the same
moral police depot, to the same moral prison-food, as the villain who
has eluded the holiest law that was ever framed; and Fate, therefore,
soiled the poetic passion of Alfieri and his lady by forcing it to the
base practices of any illicit love. The manner in which Fate executes
these summary lynchings of people's honour could not usually be more
ingenious; there seems to be a special arrangement by which offenders
are punished in their most sensitive part. The punishment of Alfieri
and o