lion's share, Alfieri appearing merely as a medallion head in profile. Room should have been found for a bust at least, for whimsical, saturnine, arrogant as he was, he possessed not only a head but a heart. Scornful of superstition, he was endowed with deep religious feeling, and the defects of his harsh, angular character were at all events remote from those national failings which had chiefly contributed to the ruin of Italy.
It is remarkable indeed that a Piedmontese, who had to teach himself classical Italian with infinite labour, and whose character possessed few distinctively national traits, should have been the reviver of the national spirit in Italy. This Alfieri unquestionably was. He had what is so deplorably wanting among the gifted men of the golden age of Italian literature, a passion for freedom and a hatred of tyranny, which impart to his works, however remote in subject from modern times, the air of indignant protests against the subjection and degradation of his country. This feeling, as well as the haughty and self-sufficing independence of his character, brings him very near to the stoical Romans of the age of Nero, whose literary productions he approaches by his declamatory eloquence, his defective feeling for nature, and the generally studied and laboured character of his poetry. Had Seneca possessed the leading requisites of a tragic poet, he would have been a kind of Roman Alfieri. Comparing Alfieri's tragedy with the modern form of the art which owes most to Seneca, the French drama of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we are sensible of a great advance; not that Alfieri is comparable as a poet or a stylist to Corneille or Racine, but that his dramatic economy is improved by the suppression of much conventional machinery, and the
