hen we think of the frightful deeds of blood
which, talking heroically of justice and liberty, France had been
committing; of the miserable series of petty rapines and extortions
which, talking patronisingly of the Greeks and Romans, the French nation
was practising upon the Italians whom it had come to liberate. That such
feeling should be elicited was natural enough. But we feel, as we turn
over the pages of the _Misogallo_, and collate with its epigrams a
certain passage in Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet
it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, narrow, pedantic
doctrinaire, whose very magnanimity is vanity and egotism, we can no
longer sympathise with the hatred of the French, which in juster and
more modest men, as for instance Carlo Botta, invariably elicits our
sympathy. Much as we dislike the republican French who descended into
Italy, the _Misogallo_ makes us like Alfieri even less. Whether this
revolution, despite the oceans of blood which it shed, might not be
bringing a great and lasting benefit to mankind by sweeping away the
hundred and one obstacles which impeded social progress; whether this
French invasion, despite the money which it extorted, the statues and
pictures which it stole, the miserable high-flown lies which it told,
might not be doing Italy a great service in accustoming it to modern
institutions, in training it to warfare, in ridding it of a brood of
inept little tyrants: such questions did not occur to Alfieri, for whom
liberty meant everything, progress and improvement nothing. As the
century drew to a close, and the futility of so many vaunted reforms,
the hollowness of so many promises, became apparent to the Italians with
the shameful treaty which gave Venice, liberated of her oligarchy, to
Austria, all the nobler men of the day, Pindemonti, Botta, Foscolo, and
the crowds of nameless patriotic youths who filled the universities,
were seized by a terrible soul-sickness; everything seemed to have given
way, each course was as bad as the other, and Italy seemed destined to
servitude and indignity, whether under her new masters the French, or
under her old masters the Austrians and Bourbons and priests. But the
feelings of Alfieri were not of this kind; he was not torn by
patriotism; he was simply pushed into sympathy with the tyrannies which
he had so hated by the intolerable pain of finding that the liberty
which he had preached was being propagandised by the natio