.
In the case of Alfieri, I think we may add that the well was empty.
Since his illness at Colmar, he had aged in the most extraordinary way:
the process of dessication and ossification of his moral nerves and
muscles, which, as I have said, was the form that premature decrepitude
took in this abnormal man, had begun. The creative power was extinct in
him, both as regards his works and himself: there was no possibility of
anything new, of any response of this wooden nature to new circumstances.
He had attained to the age of forty-two without any particular feelings
such as could fit into this present case, and the result was that he
probably had no feelings. The Countess of Albany was the ideal woman he
had enshrined her as such ages ago, and an ideal woman could not change,
could not commit an impropriety, least of all in his eyes. If she had
condescended to ridiculous meanness in order to secure for herself an
opening in English society, a subsidy from the English Government
(apparently already suggested at that time, but granted only many years
later) in case of a general break-up of French things; if she had done
this, it was no concern of Alfieri: Mme. d'Albany had been patented as
the ideal woman. As to him, why should he condescend to think about
state receptions, galas, pensions, kings and queens, and similar low
things? He had put such vanities behind him long ago.

Alfieri and the Countess made a tour through England, and projected
a tour through Scotland. Whether the climate, the manners, the aspect
of England and its inhabitants really disappointed the perhaps ideal
notions she had formed; or whether, perhaps, she was a little bit put
out of sorts by no pension being granted, and by a possible coldness of
British matrons towards a widow travelling about with an Italian poet,
it is not for me to decide. But her impressions of England, as recorded
in a note-book now at the Musee Fabre at Montpellier, are certainly not
those of a person who has received a good welcome:

"Although I knew," she says, repeating the stale platitudes (or perhaps
the true impressions?) of all foreigners, "that the English were
melancholy, I had not imagined that life in their capital would be so to
the point which I experienced it. No sort of society, and a quantity of
crowds ... As they spend nine months in the country--the family alone,
or with only a very few friends--they like, when they come to town, to
throw themselves into th