writing a novel seizes him, and upon my word he does not do badly, after all!" This high approbation inspired me with leonine courage, and I set to work again in earnest, so that in 1833 the work was ready for publication. On thinking it over now, it strikes me that I was guilty of great impertinence in thus bringing out and publishing with undaunted assurance my little novel among all those literary big-wigs; I who had never done or written anything before. But it was successful; and this is an answer to every objection. The day I carried my bundle of manuscript to San Pietro all' Orto, and, as Berni expresses it,-- "--ritrovato Un che di stampar opere lavora, Dissi, Stampami questa alla malora!" (--having Discovered one, a publisher by trade, 'Print me this book, bad luck to it!' I said.) I was in a still greater funk than on the two previous occasions. But I had yet to experience the worst I ever felt in the whole course of my life, and that was on the day of publication; when I went out in the morning, and read my illustrious name placarded in large letters on the street walls! I felt blinded by a thousand sparks. Now indeed _alea jacta erat_, and my fleet was burnt to ashes. This great fear of the public may, with good-will, be taken for modesty; but I hold that at bottom it is downright vanity. Of course I am speaking of people endowed with a sufficient dose of talent and common-sense; with fools, on the contrary, vanity takes the shape of impudent self-confidence. Hence all the daily published amount of nonsense; which would convey a strange idea of us to Europe, if it were not our good fortune that Italian is not much understood abroad. As regards our internal affairs, the two excesses are almost equally noxious. In Parliament, for instance, the first, those of the timidly vain genus, might give their opinion a little oftener with general advantage; while if the others, the impudently vain, were not always brawling, discussions would be more brief and rational, and public business better and more quickly dispatched. The same reflection applies to other branches--to journalism, literature, society, etc.; for vanity is the bad weed which chokes up our political field; and as it is a plant of hardy growth, blooming among us all the year round, it is just as well to be on our guard.