the midst
of all this, at the corner of two very quiet streets, stands the palace,
now of the Duke of San Clemente, an ungainly, yellow structure of
various epochs, with a pretty late sixteenth-century belvedere tower on
one side; a lot of shuttered and heavily-grated seventeenth-century
windows, ornamented with stone stay-laces and tags, upon the dark
street; and to the back a desolate old garden, where the vines have
crawled over the stonework, and the grotesque seventeenth-century
statues, green and yellow with lichen, stand in niches among the
ill-trimmed hedges of ilex and laurel: the most old-world house and
garden in the old-world part of the town. The eighteenth century still
seems very near as we walk in those streets and look in, through the
railings, at the ilex and laurel quincunxes, the lichened statues of
that garden; and from the roof of the house still floats, creaking in
the wind, regardless of the triumph of the Hanoverians, unconscious of
the many banners which have been thrown, mere heaps of obsolete coloured
tatters, on the dust-heap, a rusty metal weather-vane, bearing the
initials of Carolus Rex, the last successor of the standard that was
raised in Glenfinnan.

In this house was now developing one of the most singular loves that
ever were. Shortly after his introduction to the Countess of Albany,
Alfieri, terrified lest he might be forfeiting his spiritual liberty
once more, took to flight and tried to forget the lady in a mad journey
to Rome. But he had not forgotten her; and on his passage through Siena,
returning to Florence, he had explained his feelings, his fears, to
his friend Francesco Gori. This Gori, a young Sienese of the middle
class, extremely cultured, of "antique uprightness," to use the
eighteenth-century phrase, seems to have taken to his heart, as one
might some wild younger brother, or some eccentric, moody child, the
strange, self-engrossed, passionate Piedmontese. A gentle, grave, and
quiet man, he had loved the magnanimity and independence so curiously
mingled with mere vanity and egotism in Alfieri's nature; he had never
tired of hearing his friend's plans for the future, had never smiled at
his almost comic certainty of supreme greatness, he had never lost
patience with the self-meritorious egotism which made all Alfieri's
actions seem the one interest of the world in Alfieri's own eyes. To
Francesco Gori, therefore, Alfieri went for advice: ought he, or ought
he not, to