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An Arab named Abdullah El Jaridiah, grubbing among old tombs for curios, came across a roll of papyri. He sold it to Alfieri for a few francs, and Alfieri gave it to my husband." She paused; she was not a woman who said too much. "I take it that Alfieri knew no Greek?" said Mr. Fenshawe, with a touch of irony that was not lost on the lady.
"You have seen the signorina at the hotel?" put in the Governor. "No, I came straight from the yacht. I thought it advisable." "But the affair has been misrepresented. It is a mere bagatelle. There exists, shall we say, a certain disagreement between you and Signor Alfieri. There was an unhappy mistake, which I would have rectified without any help from the yacht.
He was resolved to talk matters over with Miss Fenshawe before he said a word about Alfieri or the news he had received from London. In fact, he had little doubt that a night's reflection would render her grandfather amenable to reason. If there were charges against von Kerber, let them be brought to light.
The girls found that their library was to be enriched by the best foreign editions of Tasso and Alfieri, and of Racine, and by a beautiful edition of Shakspeare. They were bewildered by the splendour of these presents, so far exceeding in value any thing they had before possessed. Their usual tea hour was long past before they thought of any thing but the wonderful box.
The Countess, going in state every Sunday to a convent where she was received with royal honours, Alfieri writing to his mother that although he was not regular at confession, he was yet provided with a most austere and worthy spiritual director in case of need, neither of them had the smallest belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. To please whom should they marry, pray?
Nay, even when, some few months later, there died at Vienna the old Abate Metastasio, and his death brought home to a rather forgetful world what a poet and what a dramatist that old Metastasio had been; even then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a worldly priest, a quasi prelate, the Abate Taruffi, could find no better winding up for the funeral oration, delivered before all the pedants and prigs and fops and spies of pontifical Rome assembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy, than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and prophesy that Metastasio had found a successor greater than himself.
Thence the clusters of great men who, at intervals, have appeared simultaneously and close to each other in the world, and the long intervening periods of mediocrity or imitation. Did the immortal genius of Dante destroy subsequent poetic excellence in Italy? Let Tasso, Ariosto, Metastasio, and Alfieri, answer. Homer did not extinguish Æschylus he created him.
On the other hand, it was a great consolation to know that, if I must die, I should die a free man, and between the two best beloved persons that I had, and whose love and esteem I believed myself to possess and to deserve." Alfieri recovered.
Dechartre remained sombre and distant during the rest of the dinner: and when, at the moment of leaving, Therese extended her hand to him, she felt that he avoided pressing it in his. The next day, in the hidden pavilion of the Via Alfieri, she found him preoccupied. She tried to distract him with ardent gayety, with the sweetness of pressing intimacy, with superb humility. But he remained sombre.
The masterpieces of Corneille and Racine are still constantly performed to crowded houses at Paris; the theatres of Italy resound with the melody of Metastasio, the dignity of Alfieri; and singing and the melodrama have nowhere banished Schiller's tragedies from the boards of Vienna and Berlin.
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