stoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses
within the city walls, where the silence was broken only by the lowing
of the herds driven along by the shaggy herdsman on his shaggy horse, by
the long-drawn, guttural chant of the carter stretched on the top of his
cart, and the jingle of his horse's bells; places inaccessible to the
present, a border-land of the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking
of those many times when he must have reined in his horse, and vaguely
and wistfully looked out on to the green desolation islanded with ruins
and traversed by the vast procession of the aqueducts, invited one to
meditate, and cry, and be a poet. And sometimes--we know it from the
sonnets to his horse Fido, who had, Alfieri tells us, carried the
beloved burden of his lady--Alfieri did not ride out alone. One of the
horses of the villa Strozzi was saddled for the Countess of Albany; and
this strange pair of platonic lovers rode forth together among the
ruins, the wife of Charles Edward listening, with something more than
mere abstract interest, to Alfieri's fiercest contemptuous tirades
against the tyranny of soldiers and priests, the tyranny of sloth and
lust which had turned these spots into a wilderness, and which had left
the world, as Alfieri always felt, and a man not unlike Alfieri in
savage and destructive austerity, St. Just, was later to say, empty
since the days of the Romans.

Towards dusk Alfieri put by his books, and descended through the twilit
streets of the upper city--where the troops of red and yellow and blue
seminarists, and black and brown monks, passed by like ants, homeward
bound after their evening walk--into the busier parts of Rome, and
crossing the Corso filled with painted and gilded coaches, and making
his way through the many squares where the people gathered round the
lemonade-booth near the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortuous
black streets filled with the noise of the anvils and hammers of
the locksmiths and nailors behind the Pantheon, made his way towards
the palace, grand and prim in its architecture of Bramants, of the
Cancelleria, perhaps not without thinking that in the big square before
its windows, where the vegetable carts were unloaded every morning, and
the quacks and dentists and pedlars bawled all day, a man as strange, as
wayward and impatient of tyranny as himself, Giordano Bruno, had been
burned two centuries before by Cardinal York's predecesso