and revealed himself as the poet for whom Italy
waited. In ten months of feverish effort he had poured forth fourteen
tragedies--among them the Antigone, the Virginia, and the Conjuration of
the Pazzi. Italy started up at the sound of a new voice vibrating with
passions she had long since unlearned. Since Filicaja's thrilling appeal
to his enslaved country no poet had challenged the old Roman spirit
which Petrarch had striven to rouse. While the literati were busy
discussing Alfieri's blank verse, while the grammarians wrangled over
his syntax and ridiculed his solecisms, the public, heedless of such
niceties, was glowing with the new wine which he had poured into the old
vessels of classic story. "Liberty" was the cry that rang on the lips of
all his heroes, in accents so new and stirring that his audience never
wearied of its repetition. It was no secret that his stories of ancient
Greece and Rome were but allegories meant to teach the love of freedom;
yet the Antigone had been performed in the private theatre of the
Spanish Ambassador at Rome, the Virginia had been received with applause
on the public boards at Turin, and after the usual difficulties with the
censorship the happy author had actually succeeded in publishing his
plays at Siena. These volumes were already in Odo's hands, and a
manuscript copy of the Odes to Free America was being circulated among
the liberals in Pianura, and had been brought to his notice by Andreoni.

To those hopeful spirits who looked for the near approach of a happier
era, Alfieri was the inspired spokesman of reform, the heaven-sent
prophet who was to lead his country out of bondage. The eyes of the
Italian reformers were fixed with passionate eagerness on the course of
events in England and France. The conclusion of peace between England
and America, recently celebrated in Alfieri's fifth Ode, seemed to the
most sceptical convincing proof that the rights of man were destined to
a speedy triumph throughout the civilised world. It was not of a united
Italy that these enthusiasts dreamed. They were not so much patriots as
philanthropists; for the teachings of Rousseau and his school, while
intensifying the love of man for man, had proportionately weakened the
sense of patriotism, of the interets du clocher. The new man prided
himself on being a citizen of the world, on sympathising as warmly with
the poetic savage of Peru as with his own prosaic and narrow-minded
neighbours. Indeed, t