His first books, "Memorie inutili" ("Useless Memories"), "Sullo Scoglio" ("On the Reefs"), and "Al di la, no" ("The Next World, No"), revealed such unbridled license of morbid tendencies that even Italians could not stomach them. He appeared to them a romanticist after the manner of Guerrazzi, addicted to the Macabre, subject to satanic inspiration, bombastic, and rhetorical. When Oriani took up a second phase of his writing in the period from 1880 to 1890 the reading public still continued to mistrust him. Although he brought his spirit to a more stable equilibrium, he carried upon himself the stigma that clung to him in consequence of his previous books, and such productions as "Il Nemico" ("The Enemy"), "Incenso e Mirra" ("Incense and Myrrh"), "Fino a Dogali" ("Up to Dogal"), "Matrimonio e divorzio" ("Marriage and Divorce"), did not absolve him from previous sins. His turgid style was more objected to than his taints and his themes, and his aggressiveness and political arrogances found greater opposition than his early decadent manner and his late negations in religious matters. He was accused of being a plagiarist. His greatest work "Lotta Politica" was characterized by a critic, L. Ambrosina, to be wholly devoid of originality. His "Momo" was called an imitation of Turgénieff's "A Neighbor's Bread." His "L'Invincibile" was derived from "Andrea Cornelis" of Paul Bourget, and the "Ultimi Barbari" ("The Last Barbarians") from Verga's "Pagliacci" and the "Cavalleria Rusticana." Thus beset, Oriani, despairing of recognition, gathered his strength for a final flight and strove to reach heights never reached before, and he wrote "The Political Struggle," "Holocaust," and "Ideal Revolts." "The Holocaust" is a study of mother and daughter. The mother has, from leading a wayward life, been able to keep body and soul together until middle age has effaced her charms. Reduced to hunger and rags, she decides to sacrifice her fifteen-year-old daughter and offers her to the first stranger whom she encounters walking beside the Arno one evening; she takes him to her contemptible rooms where the emaciated and ragged child awaits, in ignorance of her mission, the mother.