Alfieri a perfect being--a being adored and venerated by Mme. d'Albany! One cannot help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at the strange magic by which Death metamorphoses those whom he has taken in the eyes of the survivors; at the strange potions by means of which he makes love spring up in the hearts where it has ceased to exist, saving us from hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false to our nature, enabling us to lie to ourselves instead of lying to others. The Countess of Albany's grief was certainly most sincere; long after all direct references to Alfieri have ceased in her correspondence (I am speaking principally of that with her intimates at Siena), there reigns throughout her letters a depression, an indifference to everything, which shows that the world had indeed become empty in her eyes. But though the grief was sincere, I greatly question whether the love was so. Alfieri had become, in his later years, the incarnation of dreary violence; he could not have been much to anyone's feelings; and Mme. d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in political news and town gossip, even with her most intimate correspondents, shows that Alfieri played but a very small part in her colourless life. So small a part, that one may say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. d'Albany had pretty well ceased to love him at all; for had she loved him, would she have been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in all her letters, while the man she loved was killing himself as certainly as if he were taking daily doses of a slow poison? Love is vigilant, love is full of fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so little vigilant, so little troubled by fears, that when this visibly dying man, this man who had prepared his epitaph, who had settled all his literary affairs, who had written the farewell letter to his friend, actually died, she would seem to have been thunder-stricken not merely by grief, but by amazement.