n degrading to his good sense, his will and his
manhood; they had been odious, even at the moment, to his extraordinary
innate passion, or, one might almost say, monomania for independence;
he who even in his dullest and most inane years had hated the thought
of any sort of military or diplomatic position which should imply
subjection to a despotic government, whose only strong feeling about the
world in general had long been a fierce hatred and contempt both for
those who tyrannised and those who were tyrannised over, this Alfieri
had always, as he tells us, fled, though unsuccessfully, from the
presence of women whose social position (though the words sound like a
sarcasm) was sufficiently good to make any regular love intrigue
possible or probable. How much more must he not defend his liberty now
that he saw before him the direct road to glory, and felt within himself
the power to journey along it.

Thus it was, as he explains in his autobiography, that on his first
arrival in Florence, hearing everyone praising the character and talents
of the wife of Charles Edward Stuart, and seeing the beautiful young
woman at theatres and in the public promenade, he resolutely declined to
be introduced to her. The very charm of the impression which she had
thus accidentally made upon him, the vivid image of those very dark eyes
(I am translating his words, and must explain that her eyes, which
seemed blue to Bonstetten and dark to Alfieri's, were in reality of that
hazel colour which gives great prominence to the pupil, and therefore
leaves the idea of black eyes) contrasting with the brilliant fair skin
and pale blonde hair, of the graciousness and sweetness and perhaps even
a certain sad austerity in her whole appearance and manner,--all this
made Alfieri determine to avoid all personal acquaintance.

But after some months at Siena, where his thoughts had been entirely
absorbed in the literary projects which he discussed with his new
friend, the grave and good and serious-minded Gori, and one or two
Sienese professors, after that first feeling of attraction had died
away, and he felt himself covered, as it were, with an impenetrable
armour of poetic interests, Alfieri decided, on his return to Florence,
that he was quite sufficiently of a new man to expose himself without
any danger to such a lady as the Countess of Albany. He was, after all,
a different individual from that inane, dull, violent young man who in
the vacuity o