Matilde Serao is the Marie Corelli of Italy with one important qualification. She has not been obliged to subscribe to the rigors of convention. She has spoken with great frankness about whole sides of life which Miss Corelli knows, but about which she has been compelled to be silent. Not that the romances of Matilde Serao are in any sense pornographic, but she has painted her subjects so vividly and registered her sensations and impressions so sumptuously that they are considered very improper by Mrs. Grundy. She was in turn school-teacher, telegraphist, journalist, publisher, author, but throughout her writings she has kept the note of the journalist who has made a careful study of Zola and of Flaubert. Her thought is spontaneous, her expression facile, as she depicts the emotions and "feelings" of her Neapolitan characters, clad in rags or royal raiment, living in hovel or in palace. Her most successful books were "La Storia di un Monaco," "Il Ventre di Napoli" ("The Belly of Naples"), "Il Paese della Cuccagna" ("The Land of the Cockaigne"), and "Terno secco" in which the social, economic, and political world of Naples is revealed. With the third of those enumerated she tried to do for lottery-gambling in Naples what Charles Dickens did for the private schools of England. Regrettably her efforts did not have a similar result. In her Neapolitan stories the local color is not a mere background, but the very marrow of their being, with the result that it is almost impossible to reproduce it adequately in translation. Her later books were always pictures of the professional lover in different environments. He loves with fury and usually for a short time only. His amatory conduct has no ancillæ of Anglo-Saxon love-making. It is taurine and satyric. He does not always kill after the embrace, but one gathers from his conduct that he would like to do so. Time has tempered Matilde Serao's erotic literary coefficient and her last books are cool, more serene, and less interesting. One of her last books, "Ella non rispose," has recently been translated into English under the title of "Souls Divided."