GLIAZZI.

Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand performance of one of
Alfieri's plays enlivened the house on the Lung Arno. A room was filled
with chairs, arranged with curtains, and a select company invited to see
the poet (for by this respectful title he appears always to have been
mentioned) play Saul or Creon, to his own admiration, but apparently
less so to that of his guests. Occasionally, also, Alfieri and Mme.
d'Albany would go for a few days to Siena to enjoy the conversation of a
little knot of friends of their dead friend Gori; a certain Cavaliere
Bianchi, a certain Canon Ansano Luti, a certain Alessandro Cerretani,
and one or two others, who met in the house of a charming and
intellectual woman, Teresa Regoli, daughter of a Sienese shopkeeper,
married to another shopkeeper, called Mocenni, and who was one of Mme.
d'Albany's most intimate friends. Occasionally, also, some of these
would come for a jaunt to Florence, when Alfieri and the Countess moved
heaven and earth (recollecting their own aversion to husbands) that the
_Grumbler_, as Signor Mocenni was familiarly called, should be left
behind, and _la chere_ Therese come accompanied (in characteristic
Italian eighteenth-century fashion) only by her children and by her
_cavaliere servente_, Mario Bianchi. These were the small excitements in
this curious double life of more than married routine. Alfieri, who, as
he was getting old and weak in health, was growing only the more
furiously active and rigidly disciplinarian, had determined to learn
Greek, to read all the great Greek authors; and worked away with
terrific ardour at this school-boy work, crowning his efforts with a
self-constituted Order of Homer, of which he himself was the sole
founder and sole member. He was, also, having finally despatched the
sacramental number of tragedies, working at an equally sacramental
number of satires and comedies, absolutely unconscious of his complete
deficiency in both these styles, and persuaded that he owed it to his
nation to set them on the right road in comedy and satire, as he had set
them on the right road in tragedy.

A ridiculous man! Not so. I have spoken many hard words against Alfieri;
and I repeat that he seems to me to have often fallen short, betrayed by
his century, his vanity, his narrowness and hardness of temper, even of
the ideal which he had set up for himself. But I would not have it
supposed that I do not see the greatness of that ide