Weeping and raving, Alfieri was living once more upon letters received and sent as during his previous separation from Mme. d'Albany; and of all these love-letters, none appear to have come down to us. Carefully preserved by Mme. d'Albany and by her heir Fabre, they fell into the hands of a Mr. Gache of Montpellier, who assumed the grave responsibility of destroying them and of thus suppressing for ever the most important evidence in the law-suit which posterity will for ever be bringing against Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany in favour of Charles Edward, or against Charles Edward in favour of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany. But some weeks ago, among the pile of the Countess's letters to Sienese friends preserved by Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri at Siena, I had the good fortune to discover what are virtually five love-letters of hers, obviously intended for Alfieri although addressed to his friend Francesco Gori. I confess that an eerie feeling came over me as I unfolded these five closely-written, unsigned and undated little squares of yellow paper, things intended so exclusively for the mere moment of writing and reading, all that long-dead momentary passion of a long-dead man and woman quivering back into reality, filling, as an assembly of ghosts might fill a house, and drive out its living occupants, this present hour which so soon will itself have become, with all its passions and worries, a part of the past, of the indifferent, the passionless. One is frightened on suddenly being admitted to witness, unperceived, as by the opening of a long-locked door, or by some spell said over a crystal globe or a beryl-stone, such passion as this; one feels as if one would almost rather not. These five letters, as I have said, are addressed to a "Dear Signor Francesco, friend of my friend," and who, of course, is Francesco Gori; and are written, which no other letters of Mme. d'Albany's are, not in French, but in tolerably idiomatic though far from correct Italian. Only one of them has any indication of place or date, "Genzano, Mardi"; but this, and the references to Alfieri's approaching journey northward and to Gori's intention of escorting him as far as Genoa, is sufficient to show that they must have been written in the summer of 1783, when Cardinal York, terrified at the liberty which he had allowed to his sister-in-law, had conveyed her safely to some villa in the Alban Hills. The woman who wrote these letters is a strangely different being from the quiet jog-trot, rather cynically philosophical Countess of Albany whom we know from all her other innumerable manuscript letters, from the published answers of Sismondi, of Foscolo and of Mme. de Souza to letters of hers which have disappeared. The hysterical frenzy of Alfieri seems to have entered into this woman; he has worked up this naturally placid but malleable soul, this woman in bad health, deprived of all friends, jealously guarded by enemies, weak