It would be presumptuous on my part to attempt to select the winners entered in the great sweepstakes of literary fame in Italy, with no qualification for prophecy or judgment than a love of literature and a lifelong ardent consumption of it. I shall, therefore, content myself with brief discussion of the work of some of these younger writers with the particular end in view of suggesting to others the pleasure and profit that may result from more intimate acquaintance with them. About ten years ago there began to appear in the Florentine publication, _La Voce_, a series of articles critical and interpretative of French art. It is difficult now to believe that Cézanne, Courbet, Renoir, Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the school of impressionists and neo-impressionists was so little known in Italy as they were at the time of the appearance of these articles from the pen of Ardengo Soffici, a painter by training and profession enrolled in the Futuristic movement. He was, in reality, the first to speak in Italy with appreciation and intelligence of the tendencies in French art shown in the last half-century which have to-day had such a stamp of profound approval put upon them. These criticisms attracted much attention from the first, and they have since been republished under the title of "Scoperte e Massacri" ("Discoveries and Massacres"), and to-day they constitute a trustworthy guide to the schools mentioned both in presentation and in description. They were quite unlike previous criticisms, more particularly in a note of challenge, of insolence, and of prophecy. His judgments were stated with a firmness and tranquillity that savored of the dogmatic, and, although time has shown him to have been mistaken in his estimate of some of the artists discussed--Gauguin, for instance--it has corroborated most of them with remarkable accuracy. In a small way he did for Italian readers what Mr. MacColl did for English readers in his "Nineteenth Century Art," for, like that writer, he is an artist with a fastidious temperament who knows how to write. Since that time Signor Soffici has published nearly a score of books--romances, criticisms, fragments which show him to be a clear thinker with a pungent style, writing what he thinks and not what he cribs from others, and not continually advertising himself as the last cry of intelligence or the most perfect type of superman. His first book was called "Ignoto Toscano" ("An Unknown Tuscan"), and appeared in 1909, but it was not until the publication of "Lemmonio Boreo" two years later that it was realized that there had appeared a writer with a definite message: a protest against the utter triviality and purposelessness of Italian middle-class life.