A shadowy being, nay, a shadow cast in the unmistakable shape of another, so long as Alfieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems to gain consistency and form, to become a substantive person, only after Alfieri's death. This woman, whom, in the last ten years, we have seen consorting almost exclusively with Italians, and spending the greater proportion of her days in solitary reading of Condillac, Lock, Kant, Mme. de Genlis, Lessing, Milton, everything and anything; whose letters, exclusively (as far as I know them) to Italians of the middle classes, are full of fury against everything that is French; this woman, who has hitherto been a feeble replica of Alfieri, suddenly turns into an extremely sociable, chatty woman of the world, and a woman of the world who is, to all intents and purposes, French. To be the rallying point of a very cosmopolitan, literary, but by no means unworldly society, seems suddenly to have become Mme. d'Albany's mission; and reading the letters copied from the Montpellier Archives, and published by M. Saint Rene Taillandier, one wonders how this friend of Mme. de Stael, of Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of Moore, of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every sort of French, English, German, Russian, or polyglot creature of distinction that travelled through Italy in the early part of this century, could ever have been the beloved of Alfieri, the misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese professors, priests, and shop-keepers. The fact was that Mme. d'Albany could now become, so to speak, what she really was; or, at least, show herself to be such. Worldly wise and a trifle cynical she had always been; in the midst of the pages of literary review and political newspaper constituting her letters to Mme. Mocenni, Canon Luti and Alessandro Cerretani of Siena, there is a good deal of mere personal gossip, stories of married women's lovers, married men's mistresses, domestic bickerings, &c., interspersed with very plain-spoken and (according to our ideas) slightly demoralised moralisings. It is evident that this was not a woman to shrink from the reality of things, to take the world in disgust, to expect too much of her acquaintances. On the other hand these letters of the Alfieri period show Mme. d'Albany to have been decidedly a good-natured and friendly woman. She has the gift of getting people to trust her with their little annoyances and grievances; she is constantly administering sympathy to Mme. Mocenni for the tiresomeness and stupidity and harshness of her husband; she keeps up a long correspondence, recommending books, correcting French exercises, exhorting to study and to virtue (particularly to abstinence from gambling), encouraging, helping Mme. Mocenni's boy Vittorio. She is clearly a woman who enjoys hearing about other folk's concerns, enjoys taking an interest in them, sympathising and, if possible, assisting them.