at little bottle of poison, the only
thing that science could give to abolish his suffering.

To all these great and illustrious people the Countess of Albany--I had
almost said the Queen of England--introduced her "incomparable friend"
(style then in vogue) Count Vittorio Alfieri; and all of them doubtless
took a great interest in him as her lover, and a little interest in him
as _the_ great poet of Italy; not certainly without wondering--amiable
people as they were, and persuaded that France and Paris alone
existed--that Mme. d'Albany should find anything to love in this
particularly rude and disagreeable man, and that a country like Italy
should have the impudence to set up a poet of its own. The Countess of
Albany, made to be a leader of intellectual society, was happy; but
Alfieri was not. Ever since his childhood, when a French dancing-master
had vainly tried to unstiffen his rigid person, he had mortally hated
the French nation; ever since his first boyish travels he had loathed
Paris as the sewer, the _cloaca maxima_ (the expression is his own) of
the world; his whole life had been a struggle with the French manners,
the French language, which had permeated Piedmont; one of the chief
merits of the new drama he had conceived was (in his own eyes) to sweep
Corneille, Racine, and particularly Voltaire, his arch-aversion
Voltaire, off the stage.

Alfieri, with his faults and his virtues, was specially constructed, if
I may use the expression, to ignore all the good points, and to feel
with hysterical sensitiveness all the bad ones, of the French nation;
and more especially of the French nation of the pre-revolutionary and
revolutionary era. Alfieri's reality and Alfieri's ideal were austerity,
inflexibility, pride and contemptuousness of character, coldness,
roughness, decision of manner, curtness, reticence, and absolute
truthfulness of speech; above all, no consideration for other folks'
likings and dislikings, no mercy for their foibles. His ideal, even more
so than the ideal of other idealising minds, was the mere outcome of
himself; it contained his faults as well as his virtues. Now all that
fell short of, or went beyond, his ideal--that is to say, himself--was
abomination in Alfieri's eyes. Consequently France and the French,
all the nobility, the wit, the sentiment, the warm-heartedness, the
enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the childishness, the frivolity, the
instability, the disrespectfulness, the sentime