stirring
and splashing in a noisome pool, in that _cloaca maxima_, as he had
called it.

Already before settling in Paris in 1787, he had written to his Sienese
friends that, were it not for the necessity of attending to the printing
of his works (to print which permission would not be obtainable in
Italy), he would rather have established himself at Prats, at Colle,
at Buonconvento, at any little town of two thousand inhabitants near
Florence or Siena. Surrounded by, in daily contact with, some of the
noblest minds of the century, nay, of any century, by people like Mme.
de Stael, Andre Chenier, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Alfieri could write, with
a sort of bitter pleasure at his own narrow-mindedness: "Now I am among
a million of men, and not one of them that is worth Gori's little
finger."

I am almost prepared to say that Alfieri really felt as if living in
Paris, among such people and at such a moment, was a sort of saintly
sacrifice, the crowning heroism of his life, which he made in order to
print his books; that he endured the contact of this plague-stricken
city, merely because he knew that unless he corrected a certain number
of manuscript pages, and revised a certain number of proof-sheets, the
world would be defrauded of the great and sovereign antidote to all such
baseness as this in the shape of his own complete works.

Writing to his mother towards the end of the year 1788, he mentions
contemptuously the excitement and enthusiasm created by the approaching
election of the States-General, and adds calmly: "But all these sort of
things interest me very little; and I give my attention only to the
correction of my proofs, a piece of work with which I am pretty well
half through."

CHAPTER XV.

ENGLAND.

The contradictions in complex and self-contradictory characters like
those of the Frenchmen of the early revolution can be easily explained,
and, say what we will, must be easily pardoned: rich natures, creatures
of impulse, intensely sensitive to external influences, we feel that
it is to the very richness of nature, the warmth of impulse, the
susceptibility to influence, that we owe not merely these men's virtues
but their vices. But the contradictions of the self-righteous are an
afflicting spectacle, over which we would fain draw the veil: there is
no room in a narrow nature for any flagrant violation of its own ideals
to be stuffed away unnoticed in a corner. And now we come to one of the
stran