A better poet, and moreover a man of exquisite gallantry, was
Luigi Sperelli, attached to the court of the _lazzaroni_ king of Naples
and his queen Caroline. His Muse was very charming, and affected a
certain epicurean melancholy. He loved much and with a fine
discrimination, and had innumerable adventures--some of them famous--as,
for instance, that with the Marchesa di Bugnano who poisoned herself out
of jealousy, and with the Countess of Chesterfield who died of
consumption, and whom he mourned in a series of odes, sonnets and
elegies--very moving, if perhaps somewhat overladen with metaphor.
Count Andrea Sperelli-Fieschi d'Ugenta, sole heir to the family, carried
on its traditions. He was, in truth, the ideal type of the young Italian
nobleman of the nineteenth century, a true representative of a race of
chivalrous gentlemen and graceful artists, the last scion of an
intellectual line.
He was, so to speak, thoroughly impregnated with art. His early youth,
nourished as it was by the most varied and profound studies, promised
wonders. Up to his twentieth year, he alternated between severe study
and long journeys, in company with his father, and could thus complete
his extraordinary aesthetic education under paternal direction, without
the restrictions and constraints imposed by tutors. And it was to his
father that he owed his taste for everything pertaining to art, his
passionate cult of the Beautiful, his paradoxical disdain of prejudice,
and his keen appetite for the sensuous.
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