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 At present it is but the first of a triune romance of which the two latter parts are as yet unpublished.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.