"
Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin
reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose
delighted and whose verse wearied him. "But the book of books for me,"
he says, "and the one which that winter caused me to pass hours of
bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and
some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and
others, I read and read again, with such a transport of cries, tears,
and fury, that if any one had heard me in the next room he would
surely have thought me mad. In meditating certain grand traits of
these supreme men, I often leaped to my feet, agitated and out of my
senses, and tears of grief and rage escaped me to think that I was
born in Piedmont, and in a time, and under a government, where no high
thing could be done or said; and it was almost useless to think or
feel it."
[Illustration: Vittorio Alfieri.]
These characters had a life-long fascination for Alfieri, and his
admiration of such types deeply influenced his tragedies. So great was
his scorn of kings at the time he writes of, that he despised even
those who liked them, and poor little Metastasio, who lived by the
bounty of Maria Theresa, fell under Alfieri's bitterest contempt when
in Vienna he saw his brother-poet before the empress in the imperial
gardens at Schonbrunn, "performing the customary genuflexions with a
servilely contented and adulatory face.
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