who composed what were called the second and third
apartments, while the fourth contained the first apartment, or the older
students, who were mostly foreigners, besides the king's pages, to the
number of twenty or twenty-five. Alfieri was at first placed in the
third apartment, and the fourth class, from which he was promoted to the
third at the end of three months. The master of this class was a certain
Don Degiovanni, a priest even more ignorant than his good friend Ivaldi.
It may be supposed that under such auspices he did not make much
progress in his studies. Let us hear his own account:

"Being thus an ass, in the midst of asses, and under an ass, I
translated Cornelius Nepos, some of Virgil's _Eclogues_, and such-like;
we wrote stupid, nonsensical themes, so that in any well-directed school
we should have been a wretched fourth class. I was never at the bottom;
emulation spurred me on until I surpassed or equalled the head boy; but
as soon as I reached the top, I fell back into a state of torpor. I was
perhaps to be excused, as nothing could equal the dryness and insipidity
of our studies. It is true that we translated Cornelius Nepos; but none
of us, probably not even the master himself, knew who the men were whose
lives we were translating, nor their countries, nor the times in which
they lived, nor the governments under which they flourished, nor even
what a government was. All our ideas were contracted, false, or
confused; the master had no object in view; his pupils took not the
slightest interest in what they learned. In short, all were as bad as
bad could be; no one looked after us, or if they did, knew what they
were about."

In November, 1759, he was promoted to the humanity class, the master of
which was a man of some learning. His emulation was excited in this
class by his meeting a boy who could repeat 600 lines of the _Georgics_
without a single mistake, while he could never get beyond 400. These
defeats almost suffocated him with anger, and he often burst out crying,
and occasionally abused his rival most violently. He found some
consolation, however, for his inferior memory, in always writing the
best themes. About this time he obtained possession of a copy of Ariosto
in four volumes, which he rather believes he purchased, a volume at a
time, with certain half-fowls that were given the students on Sundays,
his first Ariosto thus costing him two fowls in the space of four weeks.
He much regrets th