Sir Horace Mann states that the Cardinal, on his return from hearing his brother's statement, laid the whole before the Pope, and obtained an order to Alfieri to leave Rome within fifteen days. This he denies, and says that on hearing of the plot brewing against him, he intimated to the Sardinian Minister his readiness to save the lady's honour and peace of mind by a voluntary departure; a course which he preferred to the utterly unendurable one of remaining in the same place without seeing her. Accordingly, on the 4th of March, 1783, he started for Sienna: like one stupid and deprived of sense, leaving my only love, books, town, peace, my very self, in 'Rome. Of his four or five separations, this was the saddest, because the future was more uncertain, and he declares that he as good as lost two years by reason of it, so great were the disturbance of his mind and the interruption of his pursuits. The effect must have been terrible indeed if, as he states, it made him utterly insensible to the harshest criticisms levelled at the style of his published writings, sprinkled over with durissimo, oscurissimo, stravagantissimo. He managed to get through a good deal of work notwithstanding, listened incognito with some complacency to a reading of his Virginia' in Turin, and undertook an expedition to England to buy horses. The praises lavished on them by connoisseurs pleased him, he admits, little if at all less than those accorded to his

verses.

During the whole period of separation he kept up a voluminous correspondence with the Countess, who repaid him in kind; and it would seem that the electric chain of inspiration was not broken by the chilling medium of the post. In one of her letters she spoke of having been highly gratified by the Brutus' of Voltaire. On reading this he exclaims: 'I 'who had heard it recited ten years before, and had no recollec'tion whatever of it, being instantaneously filled with a wild and disdainful emulation of both mind and heart,said to I will make 'myself: What Brutuses? what Brutuses? 'Brutuses, I will make them in duplicate; time shall show 'then if such subjects for tragedy were better addressed to me, 'or to a Frenchman born a plebeian, and subscribing himself 'for seventy years and more Voltaire Gentilhomme Ordinaire 'du Roi. No sooner said than done. Under the feverish excitement of jealous rivalry, he dashed off the plan of Il Bruto 'Primo' and 'Il Bruto Secondo.' But we are anticipating. This occurred in 1786, during another compelled absence; and the prolonged separation beginning with his banishment from Rome, terminated in the summer of 1784, when the Countess,

through the mediation of the King of Sweden, came to an arrangement with her husband. A formal instrument was signed by her, Charles Edward, and the Cardinal, and duly ratified by the Pope, by which, in return for the sacrifice of her pin-money, she obtained an amicable divorce a mensâ et thoro, with liberty to reside where she pleased. At least such was the contract as stated by Sir Horace Mann; but it would seem from subsequent occurrences that the Pope retained the power of regulating her movements or directing her place of residence.

The first use the Countess made of her partially recovered freedom was to give Alfieri a meeting at Colmar, where they spent two months together. The bond under which she lay to pass part of her time in the papal territory, obliged them to separate again at the approach of winter, which she passed in Bologna. His place of residence till the following summer was Pisa. They then met again at Colmar, which she soon afterwards quitted for Paris; whither, she having returned to Colmar after a few months' stay, he accompanied her in the autumn of 1786. The papal restriction being apparently taken off or relaxed by this time, she thought of taking up her permanent abode there, and he, much as he disliked both the country and the people, had the strongest inducements to do the same; as besides wishing to be near her, he was carefully revising a French impression of his works.

Whilst they had been thus occupied, Charles Edward had taken a step which is supposed to have excited in the heart and mind of the Countess a feeling of compunction or remorse which she had never experienced from his accusations or reproaches. In July 1784, he formally acknowledged his natural daughter by Miss Walkingshaw, and sent for her from the convent, where she was residing with her mother, to live with him as mistress of his family. Not content with calling her Lady Charlotte Stuart, he insisted on her bearing the title of Duchesse d'Albany, and on St. Andrew's Day, as if determined to celebrate it by some new extravagance, he performed the ceremony of investing her with the Order of St. Andrew, the badge of which she had already assumed.

Wraxall says: 'In 1779, Charles Edward exhibited to the 'world a very humiliating spectacle.' On the margin of her copy, Mrs. Piozzi wrote:—

'Still more so at Florence in 1786. Count Alfieri had taken away his consort, and he was under the dominion and care of a natural daughter, who wore the Garter, and was called Duchess of Albany. She checked him when he drank too much or when he talked too

much. Poor soul! Though one evening he called Mr. Greathead up to him, and said in good English, and in a loud though cracked voice: "I will speak to my own subjects in my own way, Sare. Ay, "and I will soon speak to you, Sir, in Westminster Hall." The Duchess shrugged her shoulders.'

A still more curious anecdote is recorded of a conversation with Mr. Greathead, who being left alone with Charles Edward, gradually led him to talk of 1745. At first he shrank from the topic: the reminiscence was evidently sad. But as the visitor persevered, he seemed as it were to cast off a load; his eye lighted up, his demeanour became animated, and he began the narrative of his campaign with youthlike energy, spoke of his marches, his battles, his victories, his escape, and the dangers that surrounded him, of the self-sacrificing fidelity of his Scotch companions, of the dreadful fate that had befallen so many amongst them. The impression that after forty years the recollection of their sufferings made upon him, was so strong, that his strength gave way, his voice failed, and he sank senseless on the ground. On hearing the bustle, his daughter hurried in. What means this, Sir?" she exclaimed. You have certainly 'been talking of Scotland and the Highlanders to my father. No one should touch on these things in his presence.' He has been known to burst into tears on hearing the tune of 'Lochaber no more,' which the condemned Jacobites were reported to have sung in prison.

6

Another striking illustration of his native spirit and sensibility has been preserved. The Comte de Vandreuil, son of the officer who arrested Charles Edward at Paris in 1748, and a speaking likeness of his father, came to Rome in 1787, with the Duchesse de Polignac, and thoughtlessly requested to be presented to Charles Edward, who was merely informed that a foreigner of distinction desired to pay his respects. The name was not announced by the servant, the Duchess herself having undertaken the introduction; but the moment Vandreuil entered the room, the degrading scene with which his features were indelibly associated came back upon the unhappy exile like a flash. He dropped down in a fainting fit, and Vandreuil was hurried from the room.

On August 8th, 1786, Sir Horace Mann reports that he (the 'Pretender) has lately assumed the folly practised by his father and grandfather to touch people who are afflicted with scro'fulous disorders: many old women and children have been 'presented to him for that purpose, to whom, after some cere'mony, he gives a small silver medal, which they wear about 'their necks.' This was Sir Horace Mann's last letter on the

subject. He died in November 1786, having been British Minister at Florence since 1740, 'perhaps (remarks Lord Stan'hope) the longest diplomatic service of the same post that is 'any where recorded.'* He was succeeded by Lord Hervey, who on the 29th January, 1788, informs the Secretary of State that some days before the Pretender had been seized with a paralytic stroke, which deprived him of the use of one half of his body. Two days later (January 31st) Lord Hervey writes: This morning, between the hours of nine and ten, the Preten'der departed this life.' Cardinal Caccia-Piatti informed Earl Stanhope, on the authority of some members of Count Albany's household, that he had in truth expired on the evening of the 30th January, but that the date was altered in the public announcement, on account of the evil omen which, notwithstanding the difference of the Old and New Style, was supposed to attend the anniversary of King Charles's execution. Surely a century and a half of home truths might have enabled this fated family to dispense with omens. After lying in state, his remains were buried at Frascati, and the Cardinal assumed the title of Henry the Ninth. He seems to have been an honest and well-intentioned man, although his bigotry and asceticism rendered him unpopular with the lower classes, whose amusements he curtailed, whilst his dullness wearied his accomplished and pleasure-loving colleagues of the Conclave. At the end of a long conference with him, Pius VI. laughingly remarked, he no longer wondered at the eagerness of the English to get rid of so tiresome a race.

The Duchess of Albany did not long survive her father. She died at Bologna in 1789, of the effects of an operation which she was compelled to undergo. An original miniature (formerly belonging to the Cardinal and now in the possession of the Countess of Seafield) gives a highly favourable impression of her. The features are good and the expression animated. Mann says: she is allowed to be a good figure, tall and well 'made, but the features of her face resemble too much those of 'her father to be handsome.'

The news of the Pretender's death reached the Countess in Paris in February 1788, and she was much affected by it. Her 'grief,' says Alfieri, was neither factitious nor forced, for every ' untruth was alien to this upright, incomparable soul; and not'withstanding the great disparity of years, her husband would have found in her an excellent companion and a friend, if not a 'loving wife, had he not thrust her from him by his constantly

* Mann and Walpole had not met for forty-two years.

' unfriendly, rough, unaccountable behaviour. I owe pure truth this testimony.' M. Saint René Taillandier says that her grief was rendered intensely poignant by the reflection that the duty from which she had shrunk and fled had been readily undertaken and effectively performed by another:

"The Duchess Charlotte entering the house of Charles Edward, the deserted child coming to the rescue of the deserted spouse, the natural child replacing the lawful wife and exercising her pious and salutary influence over the old man, these were contrasts which could not but painfully affect the proud Countess. We are making no idle conjectures; Madame D'Albany had too elevated a soul not to feel the painfulness of the situation. It was still worse when the Duchess Charlotte, after having rekindled a spark in the extinct heart of the hero, so gently closed his eyes and followed him to the tomb.'*

It is difficult to believe that she viewed her successor in this light. The natural daughter, taken from a convent to preside at a soi-disant royal table and receive homage as a quasi princess, underwent no sacrifice, and she was subjected to none of the restraints or insults which revolted the wife. The relation in which the two ladies respectively stood to Charles Edward were entirely different; and as to the intense grief of the Countess, nothing is more common than to feel deeply the death of those with whose lives our own have once been closely and cordially blended, however rudely and widely rent asunder at a subsequent period. The softened fancy recalls past hours of tenderness, and refuses to dwell on past causes of complaint; we forgive the wrongs we have suffered, and weep bitter tears to think that we can no longer ask pardon or atone for the wrongs we may have done.

The relations of Alfieri and the Countess were not changed by this event. It is now a recognised fact that the tie which bound them to each other was never consecrated by matrimony. Whether they were married or not has been vehemently debated, and the presumptive evidence on the affirmative side was strong. The ceremony was alleged to have taken place at Paris, after the removal of difficulties raised by the Cardinal. In March, 1792, Alfieri's mother wrote to him: I do not believe that the lady whom you announce as coming with you can feel any liking for me, since I have not the happiness to be acquainted with ' her. But if this is so, I would fain flatter myself that it is the

* Revue des Deux Mondes' for Feb. 15th, 1861, being the last of three excellent papers principally based on M. de Reumont's work.