Signor Bracco, a Neapolitan approaching sixty years of age, has for the past twenty years worn gracefully the mantle of Giacosa. His works have been published in ten fat volumes averaging three plays to a volume, mostly comedies. Of these the most important are "L'Infedele" ("The Unfaithful Woman"), and "Il Trionfo" ("The Triumph"), both published in 1895. The best of his dramas are "Tragedie dell' Anima" ("The Tragedies of the Soul") and "La Piccola Fonte" ("The Little Spring"), which becomes the fount of life in inspiration for those with whom the heroine comes in contact. The best of his tragedies is "Sperduti nel Buio" ("Lost in the Darkness"). This brief enumeration gives no idea of the versatility of Signor Bracco, who in reality has depicted in his twoscore plays the ravages of carnal love in peasant and prince, in maid and in mistress, in priest and professor, in the underworld and in the overworld, in the cradle and in the grave. Had the display of love and the passions that flow from it any confines, they would encompass Signor Bracco's imagination. Although denied what is called a scholastic education, he has studied science and philosophy, literature and art, but always with one object in view: to learn what human beings think and do when swayed by sexual passion. Not that anything that he has written can be construed as exalting it or as licensing it. On the contrary, the moral of the majority of his plays is that continence, like virtue, is its own reward. Although Signor Bracco would be the last to admit that he has not had an uplift motive in his writings, it is difficult to discover it. Nor does he point the way that will lead to avoidance of the suffering that flows, apparently with so much directness, from social convention, from privilege, and from the almost mediæval position of women in certain parts of Italy to-day. He is a realist of realists in fiction, but he is like a physician who is content to diagnose disease and leave to others its prevention and its cure.