ission of the Sardinian censor, with a heavy fine, and,
if necessary, with corporal chastisement.

In order to become a poet, Alfieri required to become a free agent; and
the only way to become a free agent, to break through the bars of what
he called his "abominable native cage," the only way to obtain the power
of writing what he wished to write, was to give up all his fortune, and
live upon the charity of the relatives whom he had enriched. So, during
the past months, he had been in constant correspondence with his sister,
his brother-in-law, and his lawyer; and now he had succeeded in ridding
himself of all his estates and all his capital. The Countess of Albany
knew Alfieri sufficiently well by this time to understand that this
alienation of all his property was a real sacrifice. Alfieri was the
vainest and most ostentatious of men; young, handsome, showy and
eccentric, accustomed to cut a grand figure wherever he went, it must
have cost him a twinge to be obliged to reduce his hitherto brilliant
establishment, to dismiss nearly all his servants, to sell most of his
horses, to exchange his embroidered velvets and satins for a plain black
coat for the evening, and a plain blue coat for the afternoon. The worst
sacrifice of all he doubtless confided, with savage bitterness, to the
Countess, as he confided it to the readers of his autobiography, it was
to resign the nominal service of Piedmont--to put aside, for good and
all, that brilliant Sardinian uniform in which he looked to such
advantage. We can imagine how this subject was talked over--how Alfieri,
with that savage pleasure of his in the self-infliction of pain and
humiliation, exposed to the Countess all the little, mean motives which
had deterred him or which had encouraged him in his liberation from
political servitude; we can imagine how she chid him for his rash step,
and how, at the same time, she felt a delicious pride in the meanness
which he so frankly revealed, in the rashness which she so severely
reproved; we can imagine how the thought of Alfieri, who had thus
sacrificed fortune, luxury, vanity, to the desire to be free, met in the
Countess of Albany's mind the thought of Charles Edward, living the
pensioner of a sovereign who had insulted him and of a sovereign whom he
had cheated, spending in liquor the money which France had paid him to
get himself an heir and the Stuarts another king.

A strange and dangerous situation, but one whose danger wa