i and Mme. d'Albany; he discovered that he had been shutting his
eyes to what all the world (by Alfieri's own confession) saw as a very
hazardous state of things; and, with the tendency to run into extremes
of a foolish and weak-minded creature, he immediately published from all
the housetops the dishonour whose existence had never occurred to him
before. To the Countess of Albany he intimated that he would not permit
her to receive Alfieri under his roof; and of the Pope (the Pope who had
so recently patted Alfieri's cheek) he immediately implored an order
that Alfieri should quit the Papal States within a fortnight. The order
was given; but Alfieri, in whose truthfulness I have complete faith,
says that, knowing that the order had been asked for, he forestalled the
ignominy of being banished by spontaneously bidding farewell to the
Countess of Albany and to Rome.

"This event," says Alfieri, "upset my brains for nearly two years; and
upset and retarded also my work in every way." In speaking of Alfieri's
youth I have already had occasion to remark that there was in this man's
character something abnormal; he was, as I have said, a moral invalid
from birth; his very energy and resolution had somewhat of the frenzy
and rigidity of a nervous disease, and though he would seem morally
stronger than other men when strictly following his self-prescribed
rule of excessive intellectual exercise, and when surrounded by a
soothing atmosphere of affection and encouragement, his old malady of
melancholy and rage (melancholy and rage whom he represents in one of his
sonnets as two horrible-faced women seated on either side of him), his
old incapacity for work, for interest in anything, his old feverish
restlessness of place, returned, as a fever returns with its heat and
cold and impotence and delirium, whenever he was shut out of this
atmosphere of happiness, whenever he was exposed to any sort of moral
hardship. On leaving Rome Alfieri went to Siena, where, years before,
when he had come light-hearted and bent only upon literary fame, to
learn Tuscan, he had been introduced into a little circle of men and
women whom he faithfully loved, and to that Francesco Gori who shared
with Tommaso di Caluso the rather trying honour of being his bosom
friend. This Gori, "an incomparable man," writes Alfieri, "good,
compassionate, and with all his austerity and ruggedness of virtue (_con
tanta altezza e ferocia di sensi_) most gentle," appears