the first, and, without waiting further, besought him "Print the
other!"




VITTORIO ALFIERI


Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would
undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and
who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct
dramatic power, not surpassed if equaled since, is scarcely more than
a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti,
a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater
regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he
belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe.
"What a singular country is ours!" said the Chevalier Nigra, one
of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the
delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the
second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. "In Paris they
admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen
are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for
me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;" and if this was true
in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what
society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.


I