In the spring of 1769 he set out on another and a longer tour. He had been disappointed in a matrimonial project, proposed to him by his brother-in-law. The young lady was rich and beautiful, but she preferred a handsome young courtier to a man already remarkable for the eccentricity of his conduct and the sombreness of his disposition: for Alfieri, withdrawn from the common routine of society by his passionate and earnest nature, could but awkwardly and reluctantly fulfil the thousand minute duties which an Italian is accustomed to pay to his lady; nor, on this occasion, did love inspire him with that devotion of heart which might have proved acceptable in lieu of petty attentions. He was now twenty, and, according to the laws of his country, of age--so that his entire fortune was at his disposal: this consisted of an income of 2500 sequins, or about 1200_l_. a year, and a large sum of ready money; and, to augment the value of his possessions, he had acquired the habits of rational economy, which sprang from the scantiness of the allowance which his prudent trustee had made him. Thus he set out with "money in his purse," and no love in his heart, except the tender recollection of his half-extinguished Flemish flame; and if with a head not much fuller of ideas, yet with a thousand sentiments awakened, which afforded matter for thought. As he drove along, he read Montaigne, or reflected on what he read--a little galled by finding that he could not construe the Latin quotations, and still more so by being obliged to skip the Italian ones. Vienna and Berlin were hastily visited, and seen without pleasure: he had beheld the results of liberty in England, and he had read of them in Plutarch, and his natural sense of independence made him revolt from the military despotisms of the north. Instinctive good sense served him better than the philosophy of Voltaire, and he recognised the cloven foot of arbitrary power in the barrack capital of the philosopher of Sans Souçi. He hurried away from these mockeries of liberalism, and found more pleasure in the simplicity of the Swedes: the contrast which barren nature afforded, in these frozen regions, to the luxuriance and glory of Italy interested and pleased him; the velocity of his sledge, as he proceeded through the silent pine forests, and over the ice-covered lakes, fostered an agreeable melancholy; and he describes his spring journey from Sweden to St. Petersburgh with a vividness and beauty which it would spoil to abridge. Embarking at the first breaking up of the frost on the Gulf of Bothnia, his boat had to struggle through the floating ice; and the novelty of his situation was a source of amusement. "This is the country of Europe," he says, "most agreeable to me, from its savage rudeness; fantastic, gloomy, and even sublime, ideas are created in the mind by the vast, undefinable silence that reigns there, making you feel as if transported away from the globe." St.