e at the very
age when I required him most."

Alfieri a perfect being--a being adored and venerated by Mme. d'Albany!
One cannot help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at the strange
magic by which Death metamorphoses those whom he has taken in the eyes
of the survivors; at the strange potions by means of which he makes love
spring up in the hearts where it has ceased to exist, saving us from
hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false to our nature,
enabling us to lie to ourselves instead of lying to others. The Countess
of Albany's grief was certainly most sincere; long after all direct
references to Alfieri have ceased in her correspondence (I am speaking
principally of that with her intimates at Siena), there reigns
throughout her letters a depression, an indifference to everything,
which shows that the world had indeed become empty in her eyes. But
though the grief was sincere, I greatly question whether the love was
so. Alfieri had become, in his later years, the incarnation of dreary
violence; he could not have been much to anyone's feelings; and Mme.
d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in political news and town
gossip, even with her most intimate correspondents, shows that Alfieri
played but a very small part in her colourless life. So small a part,
that one may say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. d'Albany had
pretty well ceased to love him at all; for had she loved him, would she
have been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in all her letters,
while the man she loved was killing himself as certainly as if he were
taking daily doses of a slow poison? Love is vigilant, love is full of
fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so little vigilant, so little troubled by
fears, that when this visibly dying man, this man who had prepared his
epitaph, who had settled all his literary affairs, who had written the
farewell letter to his friend, actually died, she would seem to have
been thunder-stricken not merely by grief, but by amazement.

The Countess of Albany was not a selfish woman; she had, apparently
without complaining, sacrificed her social tastes, made herself an old
woman before her time, in acquiescence to Alfieri's misanthropic and
routinist self-engrossment; she had been satisfied, or thought herself
satisfied, with the cold, ceremonious adoration of a man who divided his
time between his studies, his horses, and his intrigues with other
women; but unselfish natures are often unselfish from