time to time; doing everything, and
stooping to everything, he tells us, in order to be tolerated by those
priests and priestlets whom he abhorred and despised from the bottom
of his heart. "After so many frenzies, and efforts to make myself a
free man," he writes, in his autobiography, "I found myself suddenly
transformed into a man paying calls, and making bows and fine speeches
in Rome, exactly like a candidate on promotion in prelatedom." At this
price of bitter humiliation, nay, of something more real than mere
humiliation, Alfieri bought the privilege of frequenting the palace of
Cardinal York. But it was a privilege for which you could not pay once
and for all; its price was a black-mail of humbugging, and wheedling,
and dirt-eating.

Alfieri hated and despised all sovereigns and all priests; and if
there were a sovereign and a priest whom he despised and hated more
than the rest, it was the then reigning Pius VI., a vain, avaricious,
weak-minded man, stickling not in the least at humiliating Catholicism
before anyone who asked him to do it, by no means clean-handed in his
efforts to enrich his family, without courage, or fidelity to his
promise; a man whose miserable end as the brutally-treated captive of
the French Republic has not been sufficient to raise to the dignity of a
martyr. Of this Pope Pius VI. did Alfieri crave an audience, and to him
did he offer the dedication of one of his plays; nay, the man who had
sacrificed his fortune in order to free himself from the comparatively
clean-handed despotism of Sardinia, who had stubbornly refused to be
presented to Frederick the Great and Catherine II., who had declined
making Metastasio's acquaintance on account of a too deferential bow
which he had seen the old poet make to Maria Theresa; the man who had in
his portfolios plays and sonnets and essays intended to teach the world
contempt for kings and priests, this man, this Alfieri, submitted to
having his cheek patted by Pope Braschi. This stain of baseness and
hypocrisy with which, as he says, he contaminated himself, ate like a
hidden and shameful sore into Alfieri's soul; yet, until the moment of
writing his autobiography, he had not the courage to display this
galling thing of the past even to his most intimate friends. To Louise
d'Albany, to the woman between whom and himself he boasted that there
was never the slightest reticence or deceit, he screwed up the force to
tell the tale of that interview on