which he received from his ancestors, adding nothing to it but the glory of his name and the example of his life. He had married, in 1715, dame Jane de Lartigue, daughter of Peter de Lartigue, lieutenant-colonel of the regiment of Molevrier, and had by her two daughters and one son.

Those who love truth and their country will not be displeased to find some of his maxims here. He thought: That every part of the State ought to be equally subject to the laws, but that the privileges of every part of the State ought to be respected when they do not oppose the natural right which obliges every citizen equally to contribute to the public good; that ancient possession was in this kind the first of titles, and the most inviolable of rights, which it was always unjust and sometimes dangerous to shake; that magistrates, in all circumstances, and notwithstanding their own advantage, ought to be magistrates without partiality and without passion, like the laws which absolve and punish without love or hatred. He said upon occasion of those ecclesiastical disputes which so much employed the Greek emperors and Christians, that theological disputes, when they are not confined to the schools, infallibly dishonor a nation in the eyes of its neighbors: in fact, the contempt in which wise men hold those quarrels does not vindicate the character of their country; because, sages making everywhere the least noise, and being the smallest number, it is never from them that the nation is judged. We look upon that special interest which M. de Montesquieu took in the 'Encyclopédie' as one of the most honorable rewards of our labor. Perhaps the opposition which the work has met with, reminding him of his own experience, interested him the more in our favor. Perhaps he was sensible, without perceiving it, of that justice which we dared to do him in the first volume of the Encyclopédie,' when nobody as yet had ventured to say a word in his defense. He prepared for us an article upon 'Taste,' which has been found unfinished among his papers. We shall give it to the public in that condition, and treat it with the same respect that antiquity formerly showed to the last words of Seneca. Death prevented his giving us any further marks of his approval; and joining our own griefs with those of all Europe, we might write on his tomb:

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"Finis vitæ ejus nobis luctuosus, patriæ tristis, extraneis etiam ignotisque non sine cura fuit."

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VITTORIO ALFIERI

(1749-1803)

BY L. OSCAR KUHNS

TALIAN literature during the eighteenth century, although it could boast of no names in any way comparable with those of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, showed still a vast improvement on the degradation of the preceding century. Among the most famous writers of the times-Goldoni, Parini, Metastasio — none is so great or so famous as Vittorio Alfieri, the founder of Italian tragedy. The story of his life and of his literary activity, as told by himself in his memoirs, is one of extreme interest. Born at Asti, on January 17th, 1749, of a wealthy and noble family, he grew up to manhood singularly deficient in knowledge and culture, and without the slightest interest in literature. He was « uneducated," to use his own phrase, in the Academy of Turin. It was only after a long tour in Italy, France, Holland, and England, that, recognizing his own ignorance, he went to Florence to begin serious work.

At the age of twenty-seven a sudden revelation of his dramatic power came to him, and with passionate energy he spent the rest of his life in laborious study and in efforts to make himself worthy of a place among the poets of his native land. Practically he had to learn everything; for he himself tells us that he had "an almost total ignorance of the rules of dramatic composition, and an unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of writing well and handling his own language."

His private life was eventful, chiefly through his many sentimental attachments, its deepest experience being his profound love and friendship for the Countess of Albany, -Louise Stolberg, mistress and afterward wife of the "Young Pretender," who passed under the title of Count of Albany, and from whom she was finally divorced. The production of Alfieri's tragedies began with the sketch called. 'Cleopatra,' in 1775, and lasted till 1789, when a complete edition, by Didot, appeared in Paris. His only important prose work is his 'Autobiography,' begun in 1790 and ended in the year of his death, 1803. Although he wrote several comedies and a number of sonnets and satires, which do not often rise above mediocrity, -it is as a tragic poet that he is known to fame. Before him- though Goldoni had successfully imitated Molière in comedy, and Metastasio had become enormously popular as the poet of love and the opera- no tragedies had been written in Italy which deserved to be compared with the great dramas of France, Spain, and England. Indeed, it had been

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said that tragedy was not adapted to the Italian tongue or character. It remained for Alfieri to prove the falsity of this theory.

Always sensitive to the charge of plagiarism, Alfieri declared that whether his tragedies were good or bad, they were at least his own. This is true to a certain extent. And yet he was influenced more than he was willing to acknowledge by the French dramatists of the seventeenth century. In common with Corneille and Racine, he observed strictly the three unities of time, place, and action. But the courtliness of language, the grace and poetry of the French dramas, and especially the tender love of Racine, are altogether lacking with him.

Alfieri had a certain definite theory of tragedy which he followed with unswerving fidelity. He aimed at the simplicity and directness. of the Greek drama. He sought to give one clear, definite action, which should advance in a straight line from beginning to end, without deviation, and carry along the characters - who are, for the most part, helplessly entangled in the toils of a relentless fate-to an inevitable destruction. For this reason the well-known confidantes of the French stage were discarded, no secondary action or episodes were admitted, and the whole play was shortened to a little more than two-thirds of the average French classic drama. Whatever originality Alfieri possessed did not show itself in the choice of subjects, which are nearly all well known and had often been used before. From Racine he took Polynice,' 'Merope' had been treated by Maffei and Voltaire, and Shakespeare had immortalized the story of Brutus. The situations and events are often conventional; the passions are those familiar to the stage,-jealousy, revenge, hatred, and unhappy love. And yet Alfieri has treated these subjects in a way which differs from all others, and which stamps them, in a certain sense, as his own. With him all is sombre and melancholy; the scene is utterly unrelieved by humor, by the flowers of poetry, or by that deep-hearted sympathy-the pity of it all-which softens the tragic effect of Shakespeare's plays.

Alfieri seemed to be attracted toward the most horrible phases of human life, and the most terrible events of history and tradition. The passions he describes are those of unnatural love, of jealousy between father and son, of fratricidal hatred, or those in which a sense of duty and love for liberty triumphs over the ties of filial and parental love. In treating the story of the second Brutus, it was not enough for his purpose to have Cæsar murdered by his friend; but, availing himself of an unproven tradition, he makes Brutus the son of Cæsar, and thus a parricide.

It is interesting to notice his vocabulary; to see how constantly he uses such words as "atrocious," "horror," "terrible," "incest,"