Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his qualifications for tragical authorship being “a resolute spirit, very obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ... 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.”