outgrew their boyishness. Alfieri, indeed, had to struggle against so
many defects of training that he could not have reached maturity in
the longest life; and he was ruled by passions and ideals; he hated
with equal noisiness the tyrants of Europe and the Frenchmen who
dethroned them.

When he left the life of a dissolute young noble for that of tragic
authorship, he seized upon such histories and fables as would give the
freest course to a harsh, narrow, gloomy, vindictive, and declamatory
nature; and his dramas reproduce the terrible fatalistic traditions of
the Greeks, the stories of Oedipus, Myrrha, Alcestis, Clytemnestra,
Orestes, and such passages of Roman history as those relating to
the Brutuses and to Virginia. In modern history he has taken such
characters and events as those of Philip II., Mary Stuart, Don Garzia,
and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi. Two of his tragedies are from the
Bible, the Abel and the Saul; one, the Rosmunda, from Longobardic
history. And these themes, varying so vastly as to the times, races,
and religions with which they originated, are all treated in the same
spirit--the spirit Alfieri believed Greek. Their interest comes from
the situation and the action; of character, as we have it in the
romantic drama, and supremely in Shakespeare, there is scarcely
anything; and the language is shorn of all metaphor and picturesque
expression. Of course their form is wholly unlike that of the romantic
drama; Alfieri holds fast by the famous unities as the chief and
saving grace of tragedy. All his actions take place within twenty-four
hours; there is no change of scene, and so far as he can master that
most obstinate unity, the unity of action, each piece is furnished
with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of
time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover,
and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible