burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric.” In place of it he learned and read much French, then the language of polite society.

In such aimless desultory fashion Alfieri passed his boyhood. He hated all restraint, and was continually getting into difficulties with the officers of the Academy. He had more money than was good for him, and spent it in the wildest extravagances whenever the opportunity offered. He bade fair to become a more or less typical member of the Piedmont nobility, perhaps a little more of a free-thinker than most, and considerably more restive. He chafed at the lack of freedom allowed him at the Academy, and on the marriage of his sister to the Count Giacinto Cumiana besought her and the Count to use their influence to have his scholar’s bonds loosened. They succeeded, and Alfieri promptly took advantage of his liberty to join in all the dissipations of the capital, and to gratify his passion for riding. In about a year he became the owner of a stable of eight horses. When his older friends cautioned the boy against his extravagance he answered that he was his own master and intended to do as he chose.

While still at the Academy the youth had sought a position in the army, but very short service as ensign in a militia regiment proved to him that he was as little fond of military restraint as of scholastic. He traveled to Genoa with two boy friends and fell in love with their sister-in-law, a vivacious brunette. He worshiped her from a distance, becoming, as he writes in his ardent Italian, “a victim to all the feelings which Petrarch has so inimitably depicted ... feelings which few can comprehend, and which fewer still ever experienced.” On his return from Genoa he considered himself a great traveler, and spoke as such, only to be laughed at by the English, French, and German boys who had been his classmates. Immediately he was seized with a passion for travel. He was only seventeen years old, and knew that he would not be permitted to travel alone. Fortunately an English teacher was about to set out with two scholars on a journey through Italy, and was willing to have Alfieri join his party. So strict was the court of that day that the King’s consent had to be obtained before the youth could leave the country. Through his brother-in-law’s influence Alfieri obtained the royal permission to go abroad.

The travels had been looked forward to with the greatest excitement. When they were begun Alfieri professed himself utterly bored by almost everything he saw. As one of his biographers says, “He was driven from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness.” Whether this desire to surprise his readers is really the keynote of the first years in his memoirs or not, it would appear that the youth was about as restless and turbulent-minded a creature as could be met with. The further he traveled in Italy the less he liked it; he would not speak the language or read the literature, he looked at an autograph manuscript of Petrarch with supreme indifference, and wished to be mistaken for a Frenchman. Yet this boy was to become, in time, the real reviver of Italian letters.

After a fortnight in Milan the party traveled to Florence by way of Parma, Modena, and Bologna. Neither people, buildings, views, pictures, nor sculpture interested Vittorio; he no sooner reached a city than he was eager to be posting on. Even Florence, later to be his home, did not attract him; the only object he found to admire in the city was Michael Angelo’s tomb at Santa Croce. He must have been the worst traveling companion possible; he hurried his friends from Florence to Rome, and finding nothing there to interest him except St. Peter’s, went on to Naples. Naples was in the midst of a carnival, and Alfieri plunged into its extravagances as though to distract his thoughts from some brooding melancholy. He was presented to the King, went to all the balls and operas, rode, gamed, made one of the fastest set, and yet in the midst of it all was discontented. He wanted to be alone, and finally applied to the King of Piedmont through his minister at Naples for permission to travel by himself. His request was granted, and at nineteen he set out to make what was then the fashionable grand tour. He traveled in state, with plenty of money, and a body servant, and with letters of introduction to the various courts.

It so happened that Alfieri had met certain French actors during a summer holiday, and from talking with them he felt a desire to see something of the French stage. He had no wish to try his own skill at dramatic compositions—indeed his only thought of an occupation at this time was that he should some day enter the diplomatic service—but he was anxious to see something different from the absurdly conventional Italian plays produced by the school which took its name from Metastasio. He went first to Marseilles, where he spent his time between the theater and solitary musing on the seashore. Thence, after a short stay, he journeyed to Paris, full of the keenest anticipations of finding pleasure in that famous city. His memoirs tell us his feelings there. He writes: “The mean and wretched buildings, the contemptible ostentation displayed in a few houses dignified with the pompous appellation of hotels and palaces, the filthiness of the Gothic churches, the truly vandal-like construction of the public theaters at that time, besides innumerable other disagreeable objects, of which not the least disgusting to me was the painted countenances of many very ugly women, far outweighed in my mind the beauty and elegance of the public walks and gardens, the infinite variety of the carriages, the lofty façade of the Louvre, as well as the number of spectacles and entertainments of every kind.” Verily the young Alfieri was either the hardest of all travelers to suit, or the older man, looking back, wished to emphasize the perverseness of his youth.

The Piedmontese Minister presented the young traveler to Louis XV., concerning whom Alfieri wrote, “He received with a cold and supercilious air those who were presented to him, surveying them from head to foot. It seemed as if on presenting a dwarf to a giant he should view him smiling, or perhaps say, ‘Ah! the little animal!’ or if he remained silent his air and manner would express the same derision.” He was not at all attracted by the French court, which he considered very pompous, and was anxious to be out on the highroads again, driving his post-horses. In January, 1768, he crossed the channel and landed at Dover.

England delighted him, he found London far more to his taste than Paris, he was charmed with the country, the large estates, the inns, the roads, the horses, the people, all pleased him. He was particularly struck with the absence of poverty. For a time he even thought of settling there permanently, and years afterwards when he had seen much of all the European countries he said that Italy and England were the two he infinitely preferred as residences.

But of the pleasures of London’s fashionable life the young wanderer soon tired, and for variety turned coachman, and drove a friend with whom he was staying through all the city streets, leaving him wherever he wished, and waiting patiently on the box for his return. “My amusements through the course of the winter,” he wrote, “consisted in being on horseback during five or six hours every morning, and in being seated on the coach-box for two or three hours every evening, whatever might be the state of the weather.” His