the lowest order
insisted on their carriage being stopped, and on their being conducted
back to Paris, exclaiming that all the rich were flying away, taking
their treasures with them, and leaving the poor behind in want and
misery. The few soldiers on the spot would have been soon overpowered;
and nothing saved the travellers except Alfieri's courage. He at length
succeeded in forcing a passage; but there is little doubt that if they
had been obliged to return, they would have been thrown into prison, in
which case they would have been among the unhappy victims who were so
barbarously murdered by the populace on the 2d September.

They reached Calais in two days and a half, having had to show their
passports more than forty times. They afterwards learned that they were
the first foreigners who had escaped from Paris and from France after
the catastrophe of the 10th August. After stopping some time at
Brussels, they proceeded to Italy, and reached Florence in November.
That city remained Alfieri's dwelling-place, nearly uninterruptedly,
from this moment to the period of his death.

In 1795, when he was forty-six years old, a feeling of shame came over
him at his ignorance of Greek, and he determined to master that
language. He applied himself with such industry to the task, that before
very long he could read almost any Greek author. There are few instances
on record of such an effort being made at so advanced a period of life.
Yet, perhaps, a still more remarkable case than that of our poet is that
of Mehemet Ali, who did not learn to read or write till more than forty
years of age. His son, Ibrahim, never did even that. At the same time
that he was learning Greek, Alfieri amused himself by writing satires,
of which he had completed seventeen by the end of 1797. The fruit of his
Greek studies appeared in his tragedies of _Alceste Prima_ and _Alceste
Seconda_, which he composed after reading Euripides' fine play of that
name. He calls these essays his final perjuries to Apollo. We have
certainly seen him break his vow sufficiently often. The twelve
tragedies he pledged himself not to exceed had now grown to their
present number of twenty-one, besides the tramelogedy of _Abel_.

He remained quietly and happily at Florence till the French invasion in
March, 1799, when he and the Countess retired to a villa in the country.
He marked his hatred of the French nation by writing his _Misogallo_, a
miscellaneous collection in