at my brother. His embarrassment increased. He murmured:

'"Why to me so much honour?"

'"What do you reply?" I asked.

'"I am thy servant; God render the grace for the honour thou dost me to-day, and God be praised for the joy that He gives to my old age. All the benedictions of Heaven rest on thy son."'

Nothing can be finer, simpler, more effective than this scene, but when we are conscious that the son thus spoken of is the spurious offspring which Tullio Hermil loathes, our sympathies are turned aside by a sense of incongruity and disgust. We are conscious that the young man would never have gone on such an errand, never have consecrated by such expressions the spawn of his wife's incomprehensible and unexplained amour. It is impossible to bring one's self to believe in any part of the story of the Innocente, strong as the treatment is in realism of a certain kind, and seductive as is the admirable ease and limpidity of the narrative, which for smoothness of recital, and wonderful semblance of being a true narrative of real events, is not surpassed by any novelist and has been equalled by very few writers indeed.

In all his works D'Annunzio draws women with exquisite veracity and skill; and a rare intuition into the workings of their minds and the beatings of their hearts. Of men he has as yet only drawn one type, whatever they are called, Sperelli, Aurispa, Cantelmi, Hermil, they are always the same person: 'touched to fine issues,' steeped in scholarship, refined, susceptible, voluptuous, but all sick with the maladie du siècle; all infirm from the neurasthenia of too early and too unbridled self-indulgence. But his women are infinitely more varied and more intricate. They are wondrous presentments of breathing life. All the contradictions of feminine nature are portrayed with marvellous exactitude in the vicious, cruel, and frenzied sensualism of Ippolita, of which we watch the gradual growth as we watch Vesuvius on a summer night pass from slumber into fury. With what inimitable dexterity he makes us conscious of the plebeian grossness underlying her physical sorcery, the commonness of her base birth seen here and there through the dazzling sorcery of her attractions; and how natural she is in her buoyant spirits, in her gay sportiveness, in her rapid changes of mood and humour, in her mingling of cruelty and compassion! Equally does he convey to the reader the consciousness of the perfect high breeding in the Virgine delle Rocce, of the three sisters of sorrow, so alike yet so dissimilar; three figures stepped down from the canvas of the Veronese, but dimmed by solitude and long neglect. Not less admirably has he given the delicate distinction and infinite sweetness of the Siennese, Maria Ferrés (although she is indeed an almost exact reproduction of Giuliana Hermil), whilst that patrician courtesan Donna Elena Muti, shameless, lascivious, and conscienceless, is nevertheless always a high-bred woman. He has incarnated the incomparable charm of the Italian woman, the most graceful, the most impassioned, the most seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the most imperious, pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her passions. Even Ippolita, vicious as she is, is 'l'adorable Ippolita,' as De Vogüé calls her, and her portrait is surely one which will become as precious to future generations as that of Manon Lescaut is to us.

I much fear that the only work of his which will become known to the English public in general will be the Virgine delle Rocce, because (as far as it has gone) it is not indecent. The other works could not be reproduced in English; and the Virgine delle Rocce unhappily gives no just measure of the talent and strength of the writer. At present it is but the first of a triune romance of which the two latter parts are as yet unpublished. It is the cleanest, the simplest, and the most romantic of his works, but it will probably be caviare to the crowd, and it wholly lacks the great qualities of its predecessors. It is not well-constructed like the Innocente, it is not daring and intense like the Trionfo; it is not brilliant like Il Piacere; it is rambling, and vague, and shadowy, and it is difficult to collect the threads of the narrative. It is published in a fragment, which is always an unwise method of publication, but it is to be feared that when entire it will never equal the Innocente or the Trionfo. Indeed when severed from the theme of sensual psychology D'Annunzio loses in strength and in colour; he becomes desultory, almost indifferent; and wanders through his own garden of romance with little interest in it, much as in this latest story his own Oddo and Antonello stray through the ruins of Linturno and drift through the water-lilies of the lonely stream.

But this story, defective though it be, has a great charm for those conversant with certain phases of Italian life. I have known just such a grand old palace in the solitude of a deserted country, just such young daughters growing up in stately poverty and perpetual joylessness; just such paternal obsession in clinging to ruined thrones and perished faiths; just such an interminable sequence of colourless, uninterested, imprisoned days where the life is the life of the Lady of Shalott, and no eyes are lifted to see that the almond-trees are in flower.

Every page of this short book, which Frederic Leighton would have delighted to illustrate, is impressed with Italian verity of a kind which few foreigners have ever occasion to verify. The vast stone stairs of the approach, the huge dim archways, the great fountains where the stone Tritons spout and the ghosts rise with the spray in the moonlight of midnight, the dry fish-ponds full of odorous plants self sown, the neglected, wild, beautiful, fragrant gardens, the immense halls and chambers frescoed, water-gilt, marble-encrusted; the silent corridors, the ceilings lofty as the cupolas of cathedrals, the fading tapestries, the soft grey dust, the abandonment, the poverty, the stateliness, the infinite pathos and charm of this splendour, 'which dies so slowly because born of true art and of what was once an heroic nobility.' All these are portrayed with perfect fidelity in this strange and too slight story of the three daughters of the fallen House of Montega, and no less true to the facts of Italian life is the destiny which weighs upon them, the insanity which dwells amongst them in the person of their mother, whom we see living before us as she passes, carried in her perfumed and painted sedan chair, with her strange fixed regard, her tiara of ebon hair, her pallid face, her jewelled hands. Madness is a frequent malady in Italy, and few noble families are without some insane member. The afflicted person is usually kept in his or her apartments in the palace, or in one of the villas of the family, and is courteously inquired for by all visitors as Claudio in this story asks after the health of Donna Aldoina. Italians are usually kind to their insane relatives and not at all ashamed of them, but il pazzo or la pazza lends a weird fantastic gloom to the ancient and stately houses which saw their birth, and shelter their infirmity, and will hold their coffins in their crypts.

Possibly there seems more to me in this story than there actually is, because I know so well the tenor of the life therein depicted; and the absence of all objective interest, of all care for nature and for art, of all perception of the consolations to be found in both, which render that life so much more barren than it need be.

D'Annunzio has typified such barrenness of thought, such narrowness of horizon, in the family which dwells in the grand old villa of