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 Tregento, and many a time he must, no doubt, with his own mind filled by classic memories, and knowledge of the arts, and touched to impassioned appreciation of all natural beauty, have suffered acutely from the apathy, ignorance, and unconscious self-absorption of such a domestic atmosphere. He has no doubt constantly been met with the incapacity to understand, the wonder of ignorance, the blank dulness of unopened minds, such as he suggests in the following passage:--