Now again he was happy: he lived at the villa Strozzi, near the baths of Dioclesian. He spent the long mornings in study, never leaving his house except to ride over the solitary and uncultivated country around Rome, whose immense and lonely expanse invited him to reverie and poetic composition. He spent the evenings with the countess, retiring at eleven to his tranquil home, which, divided from all others, rural though in the city, and surrounded by objects of antique grandeur and natural beauty, was an abode such as Rome only in the world can afford, and peculiarly adapted to the noble poet's temper, character, and occupations.
His imagination received its happiest inspirations during this period. Besides continual labour on his former compositions, he wrote the tragedies of "Merope" and "Saul," both conceived and executed with a fervour of inspiration that allowed him no pause between the various operations into which he divided the composition of a tragedy. The "Merope" was written in a sort of indignant burst, to prove that the tragedy of Maffei on the subject, could be easily surpassed. The "Saul" emanated from reading the Bible, in the study of which he at that time occupied himself, and which awoke in him a desire to write several dramas on scriptural subjects; had it not been that, fond of forming resolutions and of adopting voluntary chains, since he cast away and abhorred all others, he had determined to limit his tragedies to twelve. The "Saul" and "Merope" caused him to exceed this number by two; but he would not be allured to go beyond.
The "Saul" is, there can be little question, the chef-d'oeuvre of Alfieri: character forms the basis of the interest, and the situations are deeply pathetic. Saul, in some degree, reminds the reader of king Lear. The Hebrew king is not, like Shakspeare's dethroned monarch, thrust from his state, and turned out by his children, a victim to the pitiless elements, and, more bitter still, the sense of undeserved injury from those whose duty it was to foster and shelter him. The children of Saul, and his son-in-law David, surround him with protestations of duty and a heartfelt wish to soothe him by their affection and care; but he is struck by God; prosperity has departed from his house, victory from his banner; and his vacillating reason discerns rebellion and dethronement in the very submissions of those around him. He struggles with the sense of ill fortune, and the sad consciousness of the occasional aberrations of his intellect; now lamenting the days of his prosperous youth, now melted to tenderness by the caresses of his children; and again, seized upon by suspicion, envy, and pride, he wildly and madly casts from him every support and hope, to find himself, in the end, alone, defeated, lost; till in a transport of shame and despair, he ends a life so tarnished and abhorrent. "Saul" is the best of Alfieri's tragedies; and, if we were called upon to point out his best scene, we should select the second act of that play.