feel the
impossibility of complete sympathy with either side. Mme. d'Albany
answered his letters with Olympic serenity. What was it to her which got
the upper hand? She was by this time one of those placid mixtures of
optimism and pessimism which do not expect good to triumph, simply
because they do not care whether good does triumph. Sismondi, in his
adoration of her, thought this might be the result of a superior
magnanimity of character; yet he kept conjuring her to take an interest
in the tragedy which was taking place before her eyes. If she will take
no interest, will not Fabre? "Does M. Fabre not feel himself turning
French again?" writes Sismondi, and there is a pathetic insistency
in the question. Fabre thought of his pictures, his collections of
antiques, perhaps of his dinner; of anything save France and political
events. Mme. d'Albany smiled serenely, and chaffed Sismondi a little for
his political passions. Sismondi, of all men the most loyal to the idea
he had formed of his friends, seems never to have permitted himself to
see the real woman, the real abyss of indifference, beneath his ideal
Mme. d'Albany. But there are few things more pathetic, I think, than the
letters of this enthusiastic man to this cold woman; than the belief of
Sismondi--writing that the retrograde measures of which he reads in the
papers give him fits of fever, that the post days on which he expects
political news are days of frenzied expectation--in the moral fibre,
the faculty for indignation, of this pleasant, indifferent, cynical
quasi-widow of Alfieri.

The story of the Countess and Foscolo is an even sadder instance of
those melancholy little psychological dramas which go on, unseen to the
world, in a man's soul; little dramas without outward events, without
deaths or partings or such-like similar visible catastrophes, but the
action of which is the slow murder of an affection, of an ideal, of a
belief in the loyalty, sympathy, and comprehension of another. The
character and history of Ugo Foscolo, like Chenier, half a Greek in
blood, and more than half a Greek in passionate love of beauty and
indomitable love of liberty, are amongst the most interesting in Italian
literature; and I regret that I can say but little of them in this
place. Reviewing his brief life, his long career from the moment when,
scarcely more than a boy, he had entered the service of liberty as a
soldier, a political writer, and a poet, only to taste the