Much, of course, must be set down to the very madness of the Pretender's jealousy, to his more than Oriental systematic guarding and watching of his wife. Mann, we must remember, had written, long before Alfieri appeared upon the scene, that Charles Edward never went out without his wife and never let her go out without him; he barricaded her apartment, and was never further off than the next room. Charles Edward undoubtedly conferred upon two people, living in a day of excessive looseness of manners, the inestimable advantage of confining their love within the bounds of friendship, of crushing all that might have been base, of liberating all that could be noble, of turning what might have been merely a passion after the pattern of Rousseau into a passion after the pattern of Dante. But what Charles Edward could not do, what no human being or accidental circumstances could bring about, was due to the special nature of Alfieri and of the Countess; namely, that this strange platonic passion, instead of dying out after a very brief time, merely intensified, became long-lived, inextinguishable, nay continued, in its absolute austerity and purity, long after every obstacle and restraint had been removed, except the obstacles and restraints which, from the very ideality of its own nature, increased for itself. And, if we look facts calmly in the face, and, letting alone all poetical jargon, ask ourselves the plain psychological explanation, we see that such things not only could, but, considering the character of the Countess of Albany and of Alfieri, must have been. The Countess had found in Alfieri the satisfaction of those intellectual and ideal cravings which in a nature like hers, and in a situation like hers, must have been the strongest and most durable necessities. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his past life, mortally afraid of falling once more under the tyranny of his baser nature, seeking on all sides assistance in that terrible struggle of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar cocoon in which it had lain torpid so long, was wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual passion just in proportion as it was absolutely and completely intellectual.