his seduction of his own wife, who in the new covenant is his sister. Meanwhile with consummate art he has described in the first chapter as the only true love that which exists between brother and sister, his apostrophe of it having been called forth by recalling the sister whom death had fortunately removed. Before he has accomplished the seduction of his wife-sister he has precipitated her into a vulgar adventure with his own brother, a pattern of all the virtues. It is a part of his consummate art to create circumstantial evidence that will tend to put the paternity of her child upon a fellow author who in other days had been civil and courteous to his wife, and had sent her a copy of his latest book with an enigmatical inscription on the fly-leaf, but in reality he succeeds in creating an atmosphere from which one senses with readiness that the real father is his brother. The book, in so far as it is concerned with the nobility of Giuliana, the sweetness of life in the country, the lovability of her mother and her children, the way in which Giuliana's emotions and thought after the advent of the child are shaped that she may grow to hate it as he hates it, as well as the mental elaborations that justify him in seeking to destroy it, and the accomplishment of it, are done in a way that shows the author to be not only intimately familiar with the workings of the normal human mind but with the depraved human mind. From the beginning of his literary career D'Annunzio was at no pains to conceal that he was the model from which he painted his heroes. The reader who identifies him with Tullio Hermil is the perspicacious reader, in the eyes of the author; the reader who considers the conduct of Tullio, infracting as it does the canons of law, of morality, and of decency, as the conduct of a superman, is, in the judgment of the author, the sapient reader. He who sees in Tullio and his conduct a beast abnormally freighted with lubricity, lacking in inhibitory qualities of a man unguided and uninfluenced by any obligation to God or man, and knowing no other obligation than the pursuit of his own pleasures and desires, is a fool, a weakling, an inanimate mass of protoplasm moulded in the form of a human being unworthy of consideration. D'Annunzio conceived himself a superman long before he began to write romances, and I am not one of those who believe that he got his conception from Nietzsche. He got it from the same indescribable source that that unbalanced monster of materialism got his. Its roots if they could be traced back to the days of the Hebrew prophets would be found to have their germinal sprouts in some descendant of Samuel or David.