countess--both foreigners--to be refugee aristocrats!

He established himself again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth
year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of
that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek
alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of
Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so
polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of
the first two acts.

Alfieri's remaining years were spent in study and the revision of
his works, to the number of which he added six comedies in 1800. The
presence and domination of the detested French in Florence embittered
his life somewhat; but if they had not been there he could never have
had the pleasure of refusing to see the French commandant, who had a
taste for literary people if not for literature, and would fain have
paid his respects to the poet. He must also have found consolation
in the thought that if the French had become masters of Europe, many
kings had been dethroned, and every tyrant who wore a crown was in a
very pitiable state of terror or disaster.

Nothing in Alfieri's life was more like him than his death, of which
the Abbate di Caluso gives a full account in his conclusion of the
poet's biography. His malady was gout, and amidst its tortures he
still labored at the comedies he was then writing. He was impatient at
being kept in-doors, and when they added plasters on the feet to
the irksomeness of his confinement, he tore away the bandages that
prevented him from walking about his room. He would not go to bed, and
they gave him opiates to ease his anguish; under their influence his
mind was molested by many memories of things long past. "The studies