'I said with a voice which vainly strove to be steady, "I am come to beg you to hold my son at the baptismal font." 'The peasant looked at me astounded, then 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