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 than his former loves, appears to have been more permanent. With this motive to remain at Florence, he could not endure the chains by which his vast possessions bound him to Piedmont. He therefore resigned his whole property to his sister, the Countess Cumiana, reserving an annuity, which scarcely amounted to a half of his original revenues. At this period, the Countess Albany, urged by the ill treatment she received from her husband, sought refuge in Rome, where she at length received permission from the Pope to live apart from her tormentor. Alfieri followed the Countess to that capital, where he completed fourteen tragedies, four of which were now for the first time printed at Sienna.

At length, however, it was thought proper, that, by leaving Rome, he should remove the aspersions which had been thrown on the object of his affections. During the year 1783, he therefore travelled through different states of Italy, and published six additional tragedies. The interests of his love and literary glory had not diminished his rage for horses, which seems to have been at least the third passion of his soul. He went to England solely for the purpose of purchasing a number of these animals, which he brought with him to Italy. On his return, he learned that the Countess Albany had gone to Colmar in Alsace, where he joined her, and resided with her under the same roof during the rest of his life. They chiefly passed their time between Alsace and Paris; but at length took up their abode entirely in that metropolis. While here, Alfieri made arrangements with Didot for an edition of his tragedies; but was soon after forced to quit Paris by the storms of the Revolution. He recrossed the Alps with the Countess, and finally settled at Florence. The ten last years of his life, which he spent in that city, seem to have been the happiest of his existence. During that long period, his tranquility was only interrupted by the entrance of the Revolutionary armies into Florence in 1799. Though an enemy of kings, the aristocratic feelings of Alfieri rendered him also a decided foe to the principles and leaders of the French Revolution; and he rejected, with the utmost contempt, those advances which were made with a view to bring him over to their cause. The concluding years of his life were laudably employed in the study of Greek literature, and in perfecting a series of comedies. His assiduous labour on this object, which he pursued with his characteristic impetuosity, exhausted his strength, and brought on a malady, for which he would not adopt the prescriptions of his physicians, but obstinately persisted in employing remedies of his own. Under this regimen his disorder rapidly increased, and at length terminated his life on the 8th October 1803, in the fifty-fifth year of his age.

The character of Alfieri may be best appreciated from the portrait which he has drawn of himself in his own Memoirs of his Life. He was evidently of an irritable, impetuous, and almost ungovernable temper. Pride, which seems to have been a ruling sentiment, may account for many apparent inconsistencies of his character. While it made him abhor kings, because superior to himself, it fed him to detest those republicans who, by too near an approach, contaminated aristocratic dignity; and it induced him, while yet undistinguished himself, and panting for literary fame, to decline a proffered introduction to Metastasio and Rousseau. But as all his bad qualities were greatly softened by the cultivation of literature, it may be presumed, that a better education, and an earlier employment of his faculties, would have rendered him a much more perfect character. His application to study gradually tranquillized his temper, and softened his manners; leaving him, at the same time, in perfect possession of those good qualities which he had inherited from nature;—a warm and disinterested attachment to his family and friends, united to a generosity, vigour, and elevation of character, which rendered him not unworthy to embody in his dramas the actions and sentiments of Grecian heroes.

To these dramas Alfieri is chiefly indebted for the high reputation to which he has attained. Before his time, the Italian language, so harmonious in the Sonnets of Petrarch, and so energetic in the Commedia of Dante, had been invariably languid and prosaic in dramatic dialogue. The pedantic and inanimate tragedies of the sixteenth century were followed, during the iron age of Italian literature, by dramas, of which extravagance im the sentiments, and improbability in the action, were the chief characteristics. The prodigious success of the Merope of Maffei, which appeared in the commencement of the last century, may be attributed more to a comparison with such productions, than to intrinsic merit. In this degradation of tragic taste, the appearance of the tragedies of Alfieri was, perhaps, the most important literary event that had occurred in Italy during the eighteenth century. On these tragedies it is difficult to pronounce a judgment, as the taste and system of the author underwent considerable change and modification during the intervals which elapsed between, the three periods of their publication. An excessive harshness of style, an asperity of sentiment, and total want of poetical ornament, are the characteristics of his four first tragedies, Filippo, Polinice, Antigone, and Virginia. These faults were, in some measure, corrected in the six tragedies which he gave to the world some years after; and in those which he published along with Saul, the drama which enjoyed the greatest success of all his productions;—a popularity, which may be partly attributed to the severe and unadorned manner of Alfieri being well adapted to the patriarchal simplicity of the age in which the scene of the tragedy is placed. But though there be a considerable difference in his dramas, there are certain observations applicable to them all. None of the plots are of his own invention. They are founded either on mythological fable or history; most of them had been previously treated by the Greek dramatists, or by Seneca. Rosmunda, the only one which could be supposed of his own contrivance, and which is certainly the least happy effusion of his genius, is partly founded on the eighteenth novel of the third part of Bandello, and partly on Prevost’s Mémoires d’un Homme de Qualité. But whatever subjects he chooses, his dramas are always formed on the Grecian model, and breathe a freedom and independence worthy an Athenian poet. Indeed, his Agis and Bruto may rather be considered oratorical declamations and dialogues on liberty than tragedies. The unities of time and place are not so Rh