lf in a time and country when and where no one else dreamed
of anything of the sort, should suddenly become, and without the
smallest agency of his, the religion and mission of the very nation
and people whom he instinctively abhorred from the depths of his soul;
that liberty, which he alone was to teach men to desire, should be the
fashionable craze, mixed up with science, philanthropy, sentiment, and
everything he hated most in the French, this was already a pain that
gnawed silently into Alfieri's soul. But when liberty was, as it were,
dragged out of his own little private temple, where he adored and hymned
it, decked out in patrician dignity of Plutarch and Livy, and carried
about, dressed in the garb of a Paris fish-wife, a red cotton night-cap
on her head, by a tattered, filthy, drunken, blood-stained crew of
_sansculottes_, nay, worse, rolled along on a triumphal car by an
assembly of lawyers and doctors and ex-priests and journalists--when
liberty, which had been to him antique and aristocratic, became modern
and democratic; when the whole of France had turned into a blood-reeking
and streaming temple of this Moloch goddess, then a sort of moral
abscess, long growing unnoticed, seemed to burst within Alfieri's soul,
and a process of slow moral blood-poisoning to begin.

The Reign of Terror came to an end, the reaction of Thermidor set
in; but this was nothing to Alfieri, for, whereas the unspeakable
profanation of what was his own personal and quasi-private property,
liberty, had hitherto been limited to France, it now spread, a
frightful invading abomination, with the armies of the Directory all
over the world; nay, to Italy itself.

It was as an expression, an eternal, immortal expression, the severest
conceivable retribution, Alfieri sincerely thought, of this rage, all
the stronger as there entered into it the petty personal vanity as well
as the noble abstract feeling of the man--it was as an expression of
this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous but little-read
_Misogallo_. This collection of prose arguments and vituperations and
versified epigrams, all larded and loaded with quotations from all the
Latin and Greek authors whom Alfieri was busy spelling out, does
certainly contain many things which, old as they are, strike even us
with the force of living contempt and indignation. Nay, even including
its most stupid and dullest violent parts, we can sympathise with its
bitterness and violence, w