The mania for systematic division of his time, the invincible tendency to routine, which follows in most Italians after the disorder and wastefulness of youth, had already got the better of Alfieri. He had, almost at the moment when the passion for literature first disclosed itself, made up his mind to write a definite number of tragedies, first twelve, then fourteen, and no more; and to devote a certain number of years to the elaborate process of first constructing them mentally, then of writing them full length in prose, and finally of turning this prose into verse; and he was later to devise a corresponding plan of writing an equally fixed number of comedies and satires in an equally fixed number of years, after which, as we have seen, he was to give up his thoughts, having attained the age of forty-five, to preparing for death. This routine is a national characteristic, and absorbs many an Italian, turning all the poetry of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful inevitableness; but Alfieri did not merely submit to routine, he enjoyed it, he devised and carried it out with all the ferocity of his nature. To this man, who cared so much for the figure he cut, and so little for all the things which surrounded him, a life reduced to absolute monotony of grinding work was almost an object of aesthetic pleasure, almost an object of sensual delight: he enjoyed a dead level, an endless white-washed wall, as much as other men, and especially other poets, enjoy the ups and downs, the irregularities and mottled colours of existence. So Alfieri arranged for himself, in his house near Santa Maria Maggiore, what to him was a life of exquisite delightfulness.