Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/335

Rh and yet arrogant, exacting, domineering; fired by a disinterested love of man, and always quarrelling with men.

Alfieri fortunately felt moved to write his Autobiography, work of intense interest, and perhaps the most thoroughly sincere among celebrated books of its order of literature. It depicts a man continually under the influence of pride and discontent, but whom pride and discontent stimulate to lofty endeavour and noble actions. Vivid indeed is the picture of his self-contempt for his wasted youth and his ignorance of his own language, the speech of Piedmont being then the worst of all provincial jargons. Most interesting is the detail of his self-education, both in purity of diction and in the dramatic art. This psychological interest is relieved and enhanced by the detail of his numerous adventures, his extensive travels, and his love affairs, three of which were memorable. In London, in 1772, he fought, by the last rays of the setting sun, unattended by seconds, a duel with the injured husband of Lady Ligonier, and wounded in the right arm, was immediately afterwards back in the theatre out of which he had been summoned to the fray. His Milan adventure, if less romantic, was more whimsical: convinced of the unworthiness of his siren, he imitated Ulysses by compelling his servant to bind him to his chair until the craving for her company had passed away.

Alfieri's third escapade of the kind is world-famous, his rescue of Louise von Stolberg, Countess of Albany, from the drunken husband who habitually maltreated her, and who, one blushes to record, was no other than Charles Edward Stuart, the chivalrous and adventurous Young Pretender of a former generation. Alfieri's