From the tragedy of the Greeks, with which he did not become acquainted until the end of his career, he was separated by a wide chasm; and I cannot consider his pieces as an improvement on the French tragedy. Their structure is more simple, the dialogue in some cases less conventional; he has also got rid of confidants, and this has been highly extolled as a difficulty overcome, and an improvement on the French system; he had the same aversion to chamberlains and court ladies in poetry as in real life. But in captivating and brilliant eloquence, his pieces bear no comparison with the better French tragedies; they also display much less skill in the plot, its gradual march, preparations, and transitions. Compare, for instance, the _Britannicus_ of Racine with the _Octavia_ of Alfieri. Both drew their materials from Tacitus: but which of them has shown the more perfect understanding 01 this profound master of the human heart? Racine appears here before us as a man who was thoroughly acquainted with all the corruptions of a court, and had beheld ancient Rome under the Emperors, reflected in this mirror of observation. On the other hand, if Alfieri did not expressly assure us that his Octavia was a daughter of Tacitus, we should be inclined to believe that it was modelled on that of the pretended Seneca. The colours with which he paints his tyrants are borrowed from the rhetorical exercises of the school. Who can recognise, in his blustering and raging Nero, the man who, as Tacitus says, seemed formed by nature "to veil hatred with caresses?"--the cowardly Sybarite, fantastically vain till the very last moment of his existence, cruel at first, from fear, and afterwards from inordinate lust.
If Alfieri has, in this case, been untrue to Tacitus, in the _Conspiracy of the Pazzi_ he has equally failed in his attempt to translate Macchiavel into the language of poetry. In this and other pieces from modern history, the _Filippo_ for instance, and the _Don Garcia_, he has by no means hit the spirit and tone of modern times, nor even of his own nation: his ideas of the tragic style were opposed to the observance of everything like a local and determinate costume. On the other hand it is astonishing to observe the subjects which he has borrowed from the tragic cycles of the Greeks, such as the _Orestiad_, for instance, losing under his hands all their heroic magnificence, and assuming a modern, not to say a vulgar air. He has succeeded best in painting the public life of the Roman republic; and it is a great merit in the _Virginia_ that the action takes place in the forum, and in part before the eyes of the people. In other pieces, while the Unity of Place is strictly observed, the scene chosen is for the most part so invisible and indeterminate, that one would fain imagine it is some out-of-the-way corner, where nobody comes but persons involved in painful and disagreeable transactions. Again, the stripping his kings and heroes, for the sake of simplicity, of all their external retinue, produces the impression that the world is actually depopulated around them. This stage-solitude is very striking in _Saul_, where the scene is laid before two armies in battle-array, on the point of a decisive engagement. And yet, in other respects this piece is favourably distinguished from the rest, by a certain Oriental splendour, and the lyrical sublimity in which the troubled mind of Saul gives utterance to itself. _Myrrha_ is a perilous attempt to treat with propriety a subject equally revolting to the senses and the feelings. The Spaniard Arteaga has criticised this tragedy and the _Filippo_ with great severity but with great truth.