Let us pause, and consider for a moment the meaning of Alfieri's question, and the meaning of Gori's answer; let us try and realise the ideas and feelings of two honourable men, seeking a higher life, in a country so near our own as Italy, and so short a while ago as the year 1777. Here was Alfieri, passionately desirous to redeem his own existence by intellectual efforts, and confident of a vague mission to awaken his countrymen to his own nobler feelings: to the contempt of sensual pleasures and worldly vanities, the hatred of political and religious servitude, the love of truth and justice, the love of Italy. Here was this Alfieri, at the very outset of his new career, solemnly confiding to his kindest and wisest friend the scruples, the fears, which restrained him from seeking the company of a woman whom he was beginning to love, and who was beginning to love him, a young woman married by mere worldly convention to a sickly, brutal, and brutish drunkard, old enough to be her father. And what were these scruples? Merely that a new love might distract Alfieri from his plans of study and work, that a woman might cheat him of glory, and Italy of the tragic drama which would school her to virtue. That there could be any other scruples appears never to have crossed Alfieri's brain: that there could be any reason to pause and ask himself whether he was doing wrong or ill before exposing to temptation the woman whom he loved, and the honour which he loved more than her; whether he had a right to return to the palace of Charles Edward and, while receiving his hospitality, while enjoying his confidence, to teach the wife of his host how to love another man than her husband; whether he had a right to return to the presence of that beautiful and intellectual lady, who had hitherto suffered only from the brutishness of her husband, and add to these sufferings the sufferings of hopeless love, the sufferings of a guilty conscience? But to the Italian of the eighteenth century, even to the man who most thoroughly despised and loathed his country's and century's corruption, no such scruple ever came. What consideration need any man or any woman waste upon a husband? What possible disgrace could come to a woman in having a lover? And did not the frantic jealousy of the besotted old husband, his continual attendance, his perpetual spying, most effectually remove any further consideration there might be for him?