an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an
unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of
writing and managing my own language." With this stock in trade, he
set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first
in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful
study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian
was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr.
Macpherson, and Cesarotti's translation of him came into Alfieri's
hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with
a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for
the verse of dialogue.

He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had
nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the classics, which he
read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the
help of a teacher. But he believed that his originality as a tragic
author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more
tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already
given up Shakespeare. "The more that author accorded with my humor
(though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was
resolved to abstain," he tells us.

This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to
accustom himself "to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not
otherwise evermore." Here he versified his first two tragedies, and
sketched others; and here, he says, "I deluged my brain with the
verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Tasso, and of Ariosto, convinced that
the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and
words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified
with my own ideas and emotions."