Again, in this sentence he begins well: 'It is of no use to deny the enormous influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day. Something might be gained indeed if we could trace the causes which have made gambling especially the vice of our generation. But I do not believe this is possible.' That is to say, he does not care to be at the trouble of such an investigation, even though he adds the acute sentence that most of the men and women of the world of pleasure in our times exhibit 'the peculiar and unmistakable signs of physical exhaustion, chief of which is cerebral anæmia. They are overtrained and overworked, in the language of training they are "stale."' He says in another place, 'Italians have no imagination.' This is but partially true; I am not sure that it is true at all. Their modern poetry is beautiful, more beautiful than that of any other nation. Their popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of no other nation are, and one may hear among their peasantry expressions of singular beauty of sentiment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, said to me once, 'So long as one's mother lives, one's youth is never quite gone, for there is always somebody for whom one is young.' A rough, rude man, a day labourer, who knew not a letter, and spent all his life bent over his spade or plough, said to me once, one lovely night in spring, as he looked up at the full moon, 'How beautiful she is! But she has no heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and suffering down here, and she is always fair and calm, and never weeps!' Another said once, when a tree was hard to fell, 'He is sorry to come away, it has been his field so long.' And when a flock of solan geese flew over our lands, going from the Marches to the mountains on their homeward way, and descended to rest, the peasants did not touch them: 'They are tired, poor souls,' said one of the women; 'one must not grudge them the soil for their lodging.' Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated indicate imagination in the speakers? And what can he possibly mean by no poets, which he says in another place? Has he never read a line of Carducci? Much as we may mourn and resent Carducci's turncoat and reactionary politics, no one can deny that he is a poet of the purest kind. Has he never heard the ringing stanzas of Cavallotti which sound like a clarion through the land? Has he never studied the exquisite if too erotic odes of D'Annunzio, or the touching verse of Stecchetti? There are others besides these who are true and fine poets also; and even in the ordinary verses written for newspapers (which in other countries are so poor and tawdry) there is frequently in Italy a true and delicate feeling and an adorable lyrical harmony which make one mourn to see things so fair wasted on so ephemeral a life.