Produced by Delphine Lettau and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net [Illustration: ALFIERI AND THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY _From the original portrait in the possession of the Marchesa A. Alfieri de Sostegno_] THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY BY VERNON LEE WITH PORTRAITS LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMX SECOND EDITION Printed by BALLANTYNE AND CO. LIMITED Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND MADAME JOHN MEYER, I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME, SO OFTEN AND SO LATELY TALKED OVER TOGETHER, IN GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE REGRET. PREFACE In preparing this volume on the Countess of Albany (which I consider as a kind of completion of my previous studies of eighteenth-century Italy), I have availed myself largely of Baron Alfred von Reumont's large work _Die Graefin von Albany_ (published in 1862); and of the monograph, itself partially founded on the foregoing, of M. St. Rene Taillandier, entitled _La Comtesse d'Albany_, published in Paris in 1862. Baron von Reumont's two volumes, written twenty years ago and when the generation which had come into personal contact with the Countess of Albany had not yet entirely died out; and M. St. Rene Taillandier's volume, which embodied the result of his researches into the archives of the Musee Fabre at Montpellier; might naturally be expected to have exhausted all the information obtainable about the subject of their and my studies. This has proved to be the case very much less than might have been anticipated. The publication, by Jacopo Bernardi and Carlo Milanesi, of a number of letters of Alfieri to Sienese friends, has afforded me an insight into Alfieri's character and his relations with the Countess of Albany such as was unattainable to Baron von Reumont and to M. St. Rene Taillandier. The examination, by myself and my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, of several hundreds of MS. letters of the Countess of Albany existing in public and private archives at Siena and at Milan, has added an important amount of what I may call psychological detail, overlooked by Baron von Reumont and unguessed by M. St. Rene Taillandier. I have, therefore, I trust, been able to reconstruct the Countess of Albany's spiritual likeness during the period--that of her early connection with Alfieri--which my predecessors have been satisfied to despatch in comparatively few pages, counterbalancing the thinness of this portion of their biographies by a degree of detail concerning the Countess's latter years, and the friends with whom she then corresponded, which, however interesting, cannot be considered as vital to the real subject of their works.