While the ghosts of these long dead men and women, ladies in voluminous brocaded skirts and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of the lace and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardinals in trailing scarlet robes and bishops with well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with their Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman nobles all in the strange old-world costumes, with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned mantles, of the Pope's household and of the military orders of Malta and Calatrava, secular dandies in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waistcoats, ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper with their heavy lace, and abundant fob jewels and inevitable two watches on the sober black of their clothes;--while these ghosts whom we have evoked in all their finery (long since gone to the _bric-a-brac_ shops) to fill the theatre-hall of the Spanish palace, sit and listen to the symphony which Cimarosa himself has written for _Antigone_, sit and watch the magnificent Duchess of Zagarolo, dressed as Antigone in hoop and stomacher and piled-up feathered hair, and the red-haired eccentric Piedmontese Count, the d'Albany's lover, bellowing the anger of Creon; let us try and sum up what the tragedies of Alfieri are for us people of to-day, and what they must have been for those people of a hundred years ago. While scribbling for mere pastime at his earliest play, Alfieri had felt his mind illumined by a sort of double revelation: he would make his name immortal, and he would create a new kind of tragedy. These two halves of a proposition, of which he appears never to have entertained a single moment's doubt, had originated at the same time and developed in close connection: that he could be otherwise than an innovator was as inconceivable to Alfieri as that he could be otherwise than a genius, although, in reality, he was as far from being the one as from being the other. The fact was that Alfieri felt in himself the power of inventing a style and of producing works which should answer to the requirements of his own nature: considering himself as the sole audience, he considered himself as the unique playwright. Excessively limited in his mental vision, and excessively strong in his mental muscle, it was with his works as with his life: the ideal was so comparatively within reach, and the will was so powerful, that one feels certain that he nearly always succeeded in behaving in the way of which he approved, and in writing in the style which he admired. And the most extraordinary part of the coincidence was, that as he happened to live in a time and country which had entirely neglected the tragic stage, and consequently had no habits or aspirations connected with it, his own desires with reference to Italian tragedy preceded those of his fellow-countrymen, his own ideal was thrust upon them before they well knew where they were; and his own nature and likings became the sole standard by which