Marco Praga is the son of Emilio Praga, who was the best-known Bohemian poet of Italy in his day (1839-1875), but who abandoned writing to teach dramatic literature in the Conservatory of Music in Milan. He professes to be the dramatic mirror held up to life and to tell the truth as he sees it, that he cannot be persuaded to camouflage it, and that when it is depicted on the stage it shall amuse rather than distress. That is what makes his most successful plays, such as "Le Vergini" ("The Virgins") and "La Moglie Ideale" ("The Ideal Wife"), depressing reading. Such conduct as they depict and such exchange of thought and sentiment as they report undoubtedly exist, but the less one knows of it and comes in contact with it the happier he or she is likely to be. If adultery could only be made a virtue for a few years, it would lose its attractiveness and many writers would have to earn their living. At the end of the nineteenth century Italy had three women poets of much distinction, one of whom, Ada Negri, had and still has great popularity. Her last book of poems, "Il libro Di Mara" ("The Book of Mara"), has shown that she still has the capacity to put into verse dramatically and lyrically the most delicate and the most dominant notes of love as she or as those she has loved has experienced it. She was born in a little village of Lombardy in 1870. Her mother worked in a factory, and she herself was for some years a teacher in the elementary schools; so she had first-hand knowledge of the shut-in life of those whose repressions and aspirations she sung and published in _L'Illustrazione Popolare_ of Milan. In these she set forth with great sincerity and with stirring lyric quality the sordid sufferings and sorrows of the toiling masses. These poems and others were published under the titles of "Fatality" and "The Tempest" in 1892 and 1894. Two years later a radical change in her social and spiritual environment was brought about by her marriage to Signor Garlanda, and soon she sang of it in a volume called "Maternity," which does for that state what her previous volumes had done for human pain and human poverty. "Dal Profondo" ("From the Depths") was but a continuation of these sentiments, tinctured with philosophical and socialistic knowledge that had been displayed for other purpose in "The Tempest." After this came a volume entitled "Esilio" ("Exile"), which reflected the same thoughts and sentiments in Swiss light. She has written two prose works, a series of short stories entitled "Le Solitarie" and "Orazioni" ("Orisons"). She glorifies purity, idealizes it, and sings its adoration.