It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri
should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of
Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he
spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever
he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the
humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of
French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he
does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like
could be true of the education of a gentleman as a gentleman got it
from the Italian priests of the last century. "We translated," he
says, "the 'Lives of Cornelius Nepos'; but none of us, perhaps not
even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated,
nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under
what governments, nor what any government was." He learned Latin
enough to turn Virgil's "Georgics" into his sort of Italian; but when
he read Ariosto by stealth, he atoned for his transgression by failing
to understand him. Yet Alfieri tells us that he was one of the first
scholars of that admirable academy, and he really had some impulses
even then toward literature; for he liked reading Goldoni and
Metastasio, though he had never heard of the name of Tasso. This was
whilst he was still in the primary classes, under strict priestly
control; when he passed to a more advanced grade and found himself
free to do what he liked in the manner that pleased him best, in
common with the young Russians, Germans, and Englishmen then enjoying
the advantages of the Academy of Turin, he says that being grounded in
no study, directed by no one, and not understanding any language well,
he did not know what study to take up, or how to study. "The reading
of many French romances," he goes on, "the constant association with
foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear
it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan