gest self-contradictions in the history of Mme. d'Albany, that is
to say, of her lord and master Alfieri.

The revision and printing of Alfieri's works had been brought to an end;
but neither he nor the Countess seems to have contemplated a return to
Italy. The fact was that they were both of them retained by money
matters. A proportion of Mme. d'Albany's income consisted in the pension
which she received from the French Court; and the greater part of
Alfieri's income consisted in certain moneys made over to him by his
sister as the capital of his life pension, and which he had invested in
French funds.

By the year 1791, the French Court and the French funds had got to be
very shaky; and those who depended upon them did not dare go to any
distance, lest on their return they should find nothing to claim, or no
one to claim from. Hence the necessity for Alfieri and the Countess to
remain in France, or, at least, hover about near it.

Now, whether the unsettled state of French affairs suggested to Mme.
d'Albany, and through her to Alfieri, that it would be wise to see what
sort of home, nay, perhaps, what sort of pecuniary assistance, might be
found elsewhere, I cannot tell; but this much is certain, that on the
19th May, 1791, Horace Walpole wrote as follows to Miss Barry:--

"The Countess of Albany is not only in England, in London, but at this
very moment, I believe, in the palace of St. James; not restored by as
rapid a revolution as the French, but, as was observed at supper at
Lady Mount Edgecumbe's, by that topsy-turvihood that characterises the
present age. Within these two days the Pope has been burnt at Paris;
Mme. du Barry, mistress of Louis Quinze, has dined with the Lord Mayor
of London; and the Pretender's widow is presented to the Queen of Great
Britain."

That we should have to learn so striking an episode of the journey to
England from the letters of a total stranger, who noticed it as a mere
piece of gossip, while the memoirs of Alfieri, who accompanied Mme.
d'Albany to England, are perfectly silent on the subject, is, to say the
least of it, a suspicious circumstance.

As he grew old, Alfieri seems to have lost that power, nay that
irresistible desire, of speaking the truth and the whole truth which
made him record with burning shame the caress of Pius VI. Perhaps, on
the other hand, Alfieri, who, after all, was but a sorry mixture of
an ancient Roman and a man of the eighteenth century, thought t