Alfieri, with his faults and his virtues, was specially constructed, if I may use the expression, to ignore all the good points, and to feel with hysterical sensitiveness all the bad ones, of the French nation; and more especially of the French nation of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era. Alfieri's reality and Alfieri's ideal were austerity, inflexibility, pride and contemptuousness of character, coldness, roughness, decision of manner, curtness, reticence, and absolute truthfulness of speech; above all, no consideration for other folks' likings and dislikings, no mercy for their foibles. His ideal, even more so than the ideal of other idealising minds, was the mere outcome of himself; it contained his faults as well as his virtues. Now all that fell short of, or went beyond, his ideal--that is to say, himself--was abomination in Alfieri's eyes. Consequently France and the French, all the nobility, the wit, the sentiment, the warm-heartedness, the enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the childishness, the frivolity, the instability, the disrespectfulness, the sentimentality, the high falutinism, the superficiality, the looseness of principle, everything that made up the greatness and littleness of the France of the end of last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri, when once he disliked a person or a thing, justly or unjustly, could only increase but never diminish his dislike. Let us look at this matter, which is instructive to all persons whose nobility of character runs to injustice, a little closer; it will help us to understand the _Misogallo_, the extraordinary apostasy which, quite unconsciously, Alfieri was later to commit towards the principle of freedom. Alfieri, intensely Italian, if mediaeval and peasant Italy may give us the Italian type, in a certain silent or rather inarticulate violence of temper--violence which roars and yells and stabs and strangles, but which never talks, and much less argues--could not endure the particular sort of excitement which surrounded him in France; excitement mainly cerebral, heroism or villainy resulting, but only as the outcome of argument and definition of principle and of that mixture of logic and rhetoric called by the French _des mots_. Alfieri was not a reasoning mind, he was not an eloquent man; above all, he was not a witty man; his satirical efforts are so many blows upon an opponent's head; they are almost physical brutalities; there is nothing clever or funny about them. In such a society as this Parisian society of the years '87, '88, '89, '90, he must have been at a continual disadvantage; and at a disadvantage which he felt keenly, but which he felt, also, that any remarkable piece of Alfierism which would have moved Italy to admiration, such as glaring, or stalking off in silence, or punching a