The attitude and the gesture, which are the things for whose sake the play exists, are, as I have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri. But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri happened to be just those which were rarest in the eighteenth century in all countries, and more especially rare in Italy; and they were the moral attitude and gesture which the eighteenth century absolutely required to become the nineteenth, and which the Italy of Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio and Goldoni absolutely required to become the Italy of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Italy of Foscolo and Leopardi: they were the attitude and the gesture of single-mindedness, haughtiness, indifference to one's own comfort and one's neighbours' opinion, the attitude and gesture of manliness, of strength, if you will, of heroism. To have written tragedies whose whole value depended upon the striking exhibition of these qualities; and to have made this exhibition interesting, nay, fascinating to the very people, to the amiable, humane, indifferent, lying, feeble-spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, till these very men were ashamed of what they had hitherto been; to stamp the new generation with the clear-cut die of his own strong character; this was the reality of the mission which Alfieri had felt within himself: a reality which will be remembered when his plays shall have long ceased to be acted, and shall long have ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined himself to be a great poetic genius, and a great dramatic innovator: he scorned with loathing the works of Corneille, of Racine, and of Voltaire, all immeasurably more valuable as poetry and drama than his own; he hated the works of Metastasio, a poet and a playwright by the divine right of genius; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest Shakespeare should spoil the perfection of his own conceptions. He slaved for months and years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the action and curtailing the dialogue and polishing the verse; yet the action was always heavy, the dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-sufficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordinary labour was not a waste: Alfieri, who never had a single poetical thought, nor a single art-revolutionising notion, was yet a great genius and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of the nineteenth century. His use consisted in his mere existence among men so different from himself; and his dramas, his elaborately constructed and curtailed and corrected dramas, were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which the image of this strange new-fangled personality might be flashed everywhere into the souls of his contemporaries. To perceive the moral attitude and gesture specially characteristic of himself, to artificially correct and improve and isolate them in his own reality, and then to multiply their likeness for all the world; to know himself