Born at Pescara, in the Regno, the old kingdom of Naples, “toward” 1863, as I find noted by a cautious biographer, he had while scarce out of his teens allowed his lyric genius full opportunity of scandalising even the moderately austere. He defined himself betimes very much as he was to remain, a rare imagination, a poetic, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range and fineness concentrated almost wholly on the life of the senses. For the critic who simplifies a little to state clearly, the only ideas he urges upon us are the erotic and the plastic, which have for him about an equal intensity, or of which it would be doubtless more correct to say that he makes them interchangeable faces of the same figure. He began his career by playing with them together in verse, to innumerable light tunes and with an extraordinary general effect of curiosity and brilliancy. He has continued still more strikingly to play with them in prose; they have remained the substance of his intellectual furniture. It is of his prose only, however, that, leaving aside the Intermezzo, L’Isottèo, La Chimera, Odi Navali and other such matters, I propose to speak, the subject being of itself ample for one occasion. His five novels and his four plays have extended his fame; they suggest by themselves as many observations as we shall have space for. The group of productions, as the literary industry proceeds among us to-day, is not large, but we may doubt if a talent and a temperament, if indeed a whole “view of life,” ever built themselves up as vividly for the reader out of so few blocks. The writer is even yet enviably young; but this solidity of his literary image, as of something already seated on time and accumulation, makes him a rare example. Precocity is somehow an inadequate name for it, as precocity seldom gets away from the element of promise, and it is not exactly promise that blooms in the hard maturity of such a performance as “The Triumph of Death.” There are certain expressions of experience, of the experience of the whole man, that are like final milestones, milestones for his possible fertility if not for his possible dexterity; a truth that has not indeed prevented “Il Fuoco,” with its doubtless still ampler finality, from following the work just mentioned. And we have had particularly before us, in verse, I must add, “Francesca da Rimini,” with the great impression a great actress has enabled this drama to make.