No man, having once thrown himself into an idea, was ever more sincerely convinced of the truth of his beliefs or more strenuous in his efforts to propagandise them than Giannoli. To destroy utterly the fabric of existing society by all possible means, by acts of violence and terrorism, by expropriation, by undermining the prevailing ideas of morality, by breaking up the organisations of those Anarchists and Socialists who believed in association, by denouncing such persons and such attempts, by preaching revolution wherever and whenever an opportunity occurred or could be improvised, to these objects he had blindly devoted the best years of his life. His was a gospel of destruction and negation, and he was occupied rather in the undoing of what he had come to regard as bad than with any constructive doctrines. All existing and established things were alike under his ban: art no less than morals and religion. He nourished a peculiar hatred for all those links which bind the present to the past, for ancient customs and superstitions, for all tradition. Had it been in his power he would have destroyed history itself. "We shall never be free," he used to say, "so long as one prejudice, one single ingrained belief, remains with us. We are the slaves of heredity, and of all manner of notions of duties, of the licit and the illicit." One day I took him to the National Gallery. I was quite unprepared for the effect of this step. He walked about nervously for some time, looking from one picture to another with evident displeasure. At last he stopped in front of Leonardo's "Madonna delle Roccie," and remained gazing at it for some minutes in silence, while a heavy frown gathered round his brows. "I hate art," he exclaimed at last. "I consider it one of the most noxious influences in the world. It is enervating and deteriorating. Art has always been the slave of religion and superstition, from the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians to our own times. You see something beautiful, perhaps, in these pictures, in these saints and Madonnas and Immaculate Conceptions? Well, when I look at them, all the darkest pages of history seem to open before me, and generations upon generations of superstitious slaves, toiling on and suffering with the ever-present terror of hell-fires and chastisement, pass before my mental vision. I should love to burn them all, to raze all these galleries and museums to the ground, and libraries with them. For what are libraries but storehouses of human superstition and error? We must free ourselves from the past, free ourselves utterly from its toils, if the future is to be ours. And we shall never free ourselves from the past until we have forgotten it. Let us leave here. I cannot stand it any longer! I do not know which is most repugnant to me, the asceticism of these early Christians or the senseless fantasies of the Greeks," and without further ado he fled.