ly some time later. Alfieri, honest
enough to lay bare his own self-degradation, was not generous enough to
hide the fact that this self-degradation was incurred out of love for
her. That her hero should have stooped so low, so low that he scarcely
dared to tell even her, surely this must have been as galling to the
Countess of Albany as was the caress of Pius VI. to Alfieri himself;
this high poetic love of theirs, this exotic Dantesque passion, had been
dragged down, by the impartial legality of fate, to the humiliating
punishment which awaited all the basest love intrigues in this base Rome
of the base eighteenth century.

And, after some time, the stock of toleration bought at the price of
this baseness was exhausted. The clerical friends and advisers of
Cardinal York, who had hitherto assured the foolish prince of the Church
that he was acting for the honour of his brother and his brother's wife
in leaving a young woman of thirty-one to the sole care of a young poet
of thirty-four, each being well known to be over head and ears in love
with the other; these prudent ecclesiastics, little by little, began to
change their minds, and the success of Alfieri's plays, the general
interest in him and his lady which that success produced, suggested to
them that there really might be some impropriety in the familiarity
between the wife of Charles Edward and the author of _Antigone_. The
train was laid, and the match was soon applied. In April 1783 the
Pretender fell ill in Florence, so ill that his brother was summoned at
once to what seemed his death-bed. Charles Edward recovered. But during
that illness the offended husband, who, we must remember, had offered a
reward for Alfieri's murder, poured out to his brother, moved and
reconciled to him by the recent fear of his death, all his grievances
against the Tuscan Court, against his wife, and against her lover. A
letter of Sir Horace Mann makes it clear that Charles Edward persuaded
his brother that his ill-usage of his wife (which, however, Mann, with
his spies everywhere, had vouched for at the time) was a mere invention,
and part of an odious plot by which Alfieri had imposed upon the Grand
Duke, the Pope, the society of Florence and Rome, nay, upon Cardinal
York himself, in order to obtain their connivance in a shameful intrigue
development. The Cardinal returned to Rome in a state of indignation
proportionate to his previous saintly indifference to the doings of
Alfier