io Alfieri,
the great Italian poet and dramatist. Alfieri was a man of wealth. In
early years he divided his time into alternate periods during which
he either studied hard in civil and canonical law, or was a constant
attendant upon the race-course, or rushed aimlessly all over Europe
without any object except to wear out the post-horses which he used in
relays over hundreds of miles of road. His life, indeed, was eccentric
almost to insanity; but when he had met the beautiful and lonely
Countess of Albany there came over him a striking change. She influenced
him for all that was good, and he used to say that he owed her all that
was best in his dramatic works.

Sixteen years after her marriage her royal husband died, a worn-out,
bloated wreck of one who had been as a youth a model of knightliness and
manhood. During his final years he had fallen to utter destitution, and
there was either a touch of half contempt or a feeling of remote kinship
in the act of George III., who bestowed upon the prince an annual
pension of four thousand pounds. It showed most plainly that England was
now consolidated under Hanoverian rule.

When Cardinal York died, in 1807, there was no Stuart left in the male
line; and the countess was the last to bear the royal Scottish name of
Albany.

After the prince's death his widow is said to have been married to
Alfieri, and for the rest of her life she lived in Florence, though
Alfieri died nearly twenty-one years before her.

Here we have seen a part of the romance which attaches itself to the
name of Stuart--in the chivalrous young prince, leading his Highlanders
against the bayonets of the British, lolling idly among the Hebrides,
or fallen, at the last, to be a drunkard and the husband of an unwilling
consort, who in her turn loved a famous poet. But it is this Stuart,
after all, of whom we think when we hear the bagpipes skirling "Over the
Water to Charlie" or "Wha'll be King but Charlie?"

END OF VOLUME ONE

THE EMPRESS CATHARINE AND PRINCE POTEMKIN

It has often been said that the greatest Frenchman who ever lived was
in reality an Italian. It might with equal truth be asserted that the
greatest Russian woman who ever lived was in reality a German. But the
Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Catharine II. resemble each other in
something else. Napoleon, though Italian in blood and lineage, made
himself so French in sympathy and understanding as to be able to play
upon the i