Alfieri, as is well known, told a great many falsehoods when he narrated the history of his life to his astonished contemporaries. He told falsehoods owing to the despotism toward himself which he exhibited, for example, in the way in which he created his own language, and tyrannised himself into a poet. He finally found a rigid form of sublimity into which he forced his life and his memory ; he must have suffered much in the process. I would also give no credit to a history of Plato's life written by himself, as little as to Rousseau's, or to the Vita nuova of Dante.