Alfredo Panzini may finally get a place in Italian letters comparable to that of Pascoli, and should his call to permanent happiness be delayed until he has achieved the days allotted by the psalmist he is likely to have the position in Italian letters which Joseph Conrad has in English letters to-day. This statement is not tantamount to an admission that it is to writers like Panzini that we are to look for new developments in imaginative literature. They will be found rather amongst a group of writers who are the very antithesis of him--the Futurists. The successor to the literary fame of Giacosa is Luigi Pirandello, another schoolmaster. His earlier writings were cast as romances, but latterly he has confined himself largely to stage-pieces which reflect our moralities, satirize our conventions, and lampoon our hypocrisies. His diction is idiomatic and telling. It reminds of de Maupassant and of Bernard Shaw. Either he inherited an unusual capacity for verbal expression or he has cultivated it assiduously. He is Panzini's junior by three years, having been born in Girgenti, June 28, 1867. His father was an exporter of sulphur, and his early life was spent amongst the simple, passionate, emotional, tradition-loving people of southern Sicily. Unlike his fellow Sicilians, Verga and Capuana, he has not utilized them to any considerable degree as the mouthpiece of his satiric comments and reflections on social life. He has taken the more sophisticated if less appealing people of northern and central Italy, and puts them in situations from which they extricate themselves or get themselves more hopelessly entangled for the reader's amusement or edification. In his last comedy, "L'uomo, la Bestia, e la Virtu" ("Man, Beast, and Virtue"), the scene is laid "in a city on the sea, it doesn't matter where," yet the characters are typically Sicilian.