all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably
misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest of women."

He had at this time already conceived that hatred of kings which
breathes, or, I may better say, bellows, from his tragedies; and he
was enraged even beyond his habitual fury by his reception at court,
where it was etiquette for Louis XV. to stare at him from head to foot
and give no sign of having received any impression whatever.

In Holland he fell in love, for the first time, and as was requisite
in the polite society of that day, the object of his passion was
another man's wife. In England he fell in love the second time, and as
fashionably as before. The intrigue lasted for months; in the end it
came to a duel with the lady's husband and a great scandal in the
newspapers; but in spite of these displeasures, Alfieri liked
everything in England. "The streets, the taverns, the horses, the
women, the universal prosperity, the life and activity of that island,
the cleanliness and convenience of the houses, though extremely
little,"--as they still strike every one coming from Italy,--these and
other charms of "that fortunate and free country" made an impression
upon him that never was effaced. He did not at that time, he says,
"study profoundly the constitution, mother of so much prosperity," but
he "knew enough to observe and value its sublime effects."

Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin
reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose
delighted and whose verse wearied him. "But the book of books for me,"
he says, "and the one which that winter caused me to pass hours of
bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and
some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and