"The reading
of many French romances," he goes on, "the constant association with
foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear
it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan
which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of
burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of
it," he says, "the French entered into my empty brain"; but he is
careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he
afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, very
bitterly.
It was before this, a little, that Alfieri contrived his first sonnet,
which, when he read it to the uncle with whom he lived, made that old
soldier laugh unmercifully, so that until his twenty-fifth year the
poet made no further attempts in verse. When he left school he spent
three years in travel, after the fashion of those grand-touring days
when you had to be a gentleman of birth and fortune in order to
travel, and when you journeyed by your own conveyance from capital to
capital, with letters to your sovereign's ambassadors everywhere, and
spent your money handsomely upon the dissipations of the countries
through which you passed. Alfieri is constantly at the trouble to have
us know that he was a very morose and ill-conditioned young animal,
and the figure he makes as a traveler is no more amiable than
edifying.
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