Alfieri had always had what, to us, may seem very strange notions on the subject of love, but which were not strange when we consider the times and nation in general, and the man in particular. After the various love manias which preceded his meeting with Mme. d'Albany, he had determined, as he tells us, to save his peace of mind and dignity by refusing to fall in love with women of respectable position. The Countess of Albany, by enchaining him in the bonds of what he called "worthy love," had saved him from any chance of fresh follies with these alarming "virtuous women." But follies with women of less respectable position and less obvious virtue appear to have presented no fear of degradation to Alfieri's mind. And now, late on in the nineties, when Mme. d'Albany was rapidly growing plain and stout and elderly, and he was getting into the systematic habit of regarding her less in her reality than in the ideal image which he had arranged in his mind; now, when he was writing the autobiography where the Countess figured as his Beatrice, and when he was composing the Latin epitaphs which were to unite his tomb with that of the woman "a Victorio Alferio, ultra resomnia dilecta," just at this time Alfieri appears to have returned to those flirtations with women neither respectable nor virtuous which seemed to him so morally safe to indulge in. A very strange note, preserved at Siena, to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by an allusion to Hercules and Omphale, shows that Alfieri frequented in Florence other society besides that which crowded round his lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi.