ting renegade, is an unendurable
spectacle also; we should like to wash our hands of him as he tried to
wash his hands of the Revolution.

All this political atrabiliousness did not improve Alfieri's temper;
and could not have made it easier or more agreeable to live with him.
The Countess of Albany naturally disliked the Revolution and the
French, after all the grief and inconvenience which she owed them; she
naturally, also, disliked everything that Alfieri disliked. Still, I
cannot help fancying that this woman, far more intellectual than
passionate, and growing more indifferent, more easy-going, more
half-optimistically, half-cynically charitable towards the world with
every year that saw her grow fat, and plain, and dowdy,--I cannot help
fancying that the Countess of Albany must have got to listen to
Alfieri's misogallic furies much as she might have listened to his
groans had he been afflicted with gout or the toothache, sympathising
with the pain, but just a little weary of its expression. She must
also, at times, have compared the little company of select provincial
notabilities, illustrious people never known beyond their town and their
lifetime, which she collected about herself and Alfieri in the house by
the Arno, with the brilliant society which had assembled in her hotel
in Paris. To her, who was, after all, not Italian, but French by
education and temper, and who had been steeped anew in French ideas and
habits, this small fry of Italian literature, professional and pedantic,
able to discuss and (alas! but too able) to hold forth, but absolutely
unable to talk, to _causer_ in the French sense, must have become rather
oppressive. She and Alfieri were both growing elderly, and the hearth by
which they were seated, alone, childless, with nothing but the ghost of
their former passion, the ghost of their former ideal, to keep them
company, was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. Alfieri, working off
his over-excitement in a system of tremendous self-education, sitting
for the greater part of the day poring over Latin and Greek and Hebrew
grammars, and exercises and annotated editions, till he was so exhausted
that he could scarcely digest his dinner; the Countess killing the
endless days reading new books of philosophy, of poetry, of fiction,
anything and everything that came to hand, writing piles and piles of
letters to every person of her acquaintance; this double existence of
bored and overworked dreari