and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her house in 1788, found, to his surprise, that all the plate belonging to Mme. d'Albany was engraved with the royal arms of England; that guests were conducted through an ante-room in which stood a royal throne also emblazoned with the arms of England; nay, that the servants had orders to address the lady of the house by the title of a queen: a state of things whose institution by a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and who made no secret of her hatred of Charles Edward, whose toleration by a man who scorned the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those strange anomalies which teach us the enormous advance in self-respect and self-consistency due to social and democratic progress, an improvement which separates in feeling even the most mediocre and worldly men and women of to-day from the most high-minded and eccentric men and women of a century ago. To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Countess of Albany, to risk part of her fortune and to relinquish her royal state, as well as to sink into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in both parties concerned, a variety of reasons, contemptible in our eyes, excellent in their own, against legitimating their connection. And, on the other hand, no corresponding inducement. Why should they get married? The Countess, going in state every Sunday to a convent where she was received with royal honours, Alfieri writing to his mother that although he was not regular at confession, he was yet provided with a most austere and worthy spiritual director in case of need, neither of them had the smallest belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. To please whom should they marry, pray? To please religion? Why, they had none. To please society? Why, society, in this Paris of the year 1788, at least such aristocratic society as they cared to see, consisted entirely either of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each with a husband or wife somewhere in the background, or of even more interesting triangular arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, husband, and lover, all living together on charming terms, and provided, in case of disagreement, each with a _lettre de cachet_ which should lock the other up in the Bastille. A Queen of England by right divine, keeping open house in company with a ferociously republican Piedmontese poet, was indeed a new and perhaps a questionable case; but the pre-revolutionary society of Paris was too philosophical to be surprised at anything; and, after very little hesitation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the well-born and amusing people in Paris did not insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting married, why should they go out of their way to do so? We good people of the nineteenth century should have liked them the better; but then, you see, it was the peculiarity of the men and women of the eighteenth century to