ut to be charmed by
a fairy tale, which, if it does not paint the stern realities of life,
at least charms by its imagination.

The more impassioned mind and vehement passions of Alfieri disdained
those trammels by which the French and Italian stages had so long been
fettered. Gifted by nature with an ardent imagination, impetuous
feelings, deep and lasting emotions, he early saw that the modern drama,
founded on, and fettered by, the strict observance of the Greek unities,
and yet discarding its broken and rapid diction, its profound knowledge
of the human heart, its vehement expression of passion, had departed far
from the real object of the art, and could not be brought back to it but
by a total change of system. He has himself told us, in his most
interesting life, that when he read the tragedies of Racine and
Corneille, the book fell from his hands. They conveyed no idea whatever
of reality; they had no resemblance to the ardent feelings which he felt
burning in his own breast. Anxiously seeking vent for passions too
fierce to be controlled, he found it in the study of the Greek drama.
The wrath of Medea, the heroism of Antigone, the woes of Andromache, the
love of Phaedra, found a responsive echo in his bosom; they combined
every thing he could desire, they represented every thing that he felt.
He saw what Tragedy had been--what it ought to be. His taste was
immediately formed on the true model. When he came to write tragedies
himself, he composed them on the plan of Sophocles. He did more. He made
the language as brief, the voice of passion as powerful, the plot as
simple; but he brought even fewer characters on the stage. He trusted
entirely to the force of passion the wail of suffering, the accents of
despair. Immense was the effect of this recurrence to unsophisticated
feeling, in a luxurious and effeminate society. It was like the burst of
admiration with which the picture of the human heart was at the same
time hailed in France, drawn by the magic hand of Rousseau; or, in the
next age, the fierce passions of the melodramatic corsairs of Byron were
received in the artificial circles of London society. Nature was
something new; they had never heard her voice before.

Had Alfieri, with this ardent mind and clear perception of the true end
of the drama, been endowed with that _general_ knowledge of the human
heart, and of human character in all its bearings, which the Greek
dramatists possessed he would have fo