"Do you know that I only once saw Count Alfieri in my life, and could you guess how? I saw him laid in his bier: I was told that he had hardly altered; his physiognomy appeared to me to be noble and grave; death doubtless gave it an added severity; the coffin was a little too short, and they bent the dead man's head upon his breast, which caused him to make a terrible movement."
Nothing is so sad as, at the end of our days, to read what we have written in our youth: all that was in the present is now in the past.
King Henry IX.
I saw for a moment in Rome, in 1803, the Cardinal of York, Henry IX., that last of the Stuarts[643], then seventy-nine years of age. He had had the weakness to accept a pension from George III.: the widow of Charles I.[644] had in vain begged one from Cromwell. Thus the House of Stuart took one hundred and nineteen years to die out after losing the throne which it never recovered. Three pretenders have handed on to one another in exile the shadow of a crown; they had intelligence and courage: what did they lack? The hand of God.
Besides, the Stuarts consoled themselves at the sight of Rome; they were but one slight accident the more in those vast fragments, a small shattered column raised in the midst of a great burial-ground of ruins. Their House, in disappearing from the world, enjoyed yet this further comfort: it saw the fall of old Europe; the fatality clinging to the Stuarts dragged other kings with them to the dust, among whom was Louis XVI., whose grandfather had refused an asylum to the descendant of Charles I.[645], and Charles X. has died in exile at the age of the Cardinal of York, and his son and his grandson are wanderers on the face of the earth!
Lalande's[646] Journey in Italy, in 1765 and 1766, remains the best and the most exact as regards the Rome of the arts and of antiquities:
"I like to read the historians and poets," he says, "but one could not read them with more pleasure than when treading the soil which bore them, climbing the hills they describe, and watching the flow of the rivers they have sung."
That is not so bad for an astronomer who used to eat spiders.
Duclos[647], who is almost as lean and dry as Lalande, makes this shrewd observation: