he Sacred College, the still very
flirtatious old Cardinal Gerdil. The hall was nearly full when the stir
in the crowd, and the general looking in one direction, announced the
arrival of a guest who excited unwonted attention. A young woman, who
scarcely looked her full age of thirty, small, slender, very simply and
elegantly dressed, with something still girlish in her small irregular
features and complexion of northern brilliancy, was conducted along the
gangway between the rows of chairs, and, as if she were the queen of the
entertainment, solemnly installed by the side of the Princess Rezzonico
in the first row. Was it because her husband had called himself King of
England, or because her lover was the author of the play about to be
performed? Be it as it may, the Countess of Albany was the object of
universal curiosity, and the emotion which she displayed during the play
was a second and perhaps more interesting performance for the
scandal-loving Romans.

While the ghosts of these long dead men and women, ladies in voluminous
brocaded skirts and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of the lace
and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardinals in trailing scarlet robes
and bishops with well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with their
Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman nobles all in the strange old-world
costumes, with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned mantles, of the
Pope's household and of the military orders of Malta and Calatrava,
secular dandies in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waistcoats,
ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper with their heavy lace,
and abundant fob jewels and inevitable two watches on the sober black
of their clothes;--while these ghosts whom we have evoked in all
their finery (long since gone to the _bric-a-brac_ shops) to fill the
theatre-hall of the Spanish palace, sit and listen to the symphony
which Cimarosa himself has written for _Antigone_, sit and watch the
magnificent Duchess of Zagarolo, dressed as Antigone in hoop and
stomacher and piled-up feathered hair, and the red-haired eccentric
Piedmontese Count, the d'Albany's lover, bellowing the anger of Creon;
let us try and sum up what the tragedies of Alfieri are for us people of
to-day, and what they must have been for those people of a hundred years
ago.

While scribbling for mere pastime at his earliest play, Alfieri had felt
his mind illumined by a sort of double revelation: he would make his
name immortal, and