I may mention at all events the slightly perverse fact that, thanks, on this side, to the highest watermark of translation, Signor D’Annunzio makes his best appeal to the English public as a dramatist. Of each of the three English versions of other examples of his work whose titles are inscribed at the beginning of these remarks it may be said that they are adequate and respectable considering the great difficulty encountered. The author’s highest good fortune has nevertheless been at the hands of his French interpreter, who has managed to keep constantly close to him—allowing for an occasional inconsequent failure of courage when the directness of the original _brave l’honnêteté_—and yet to achieve a tone not less idiomatic, and above all not less marked by “authority,” than his own. Mr. Arthur Symons, among ourselves, however, has rendered the somewhat insistent eloquence of “La Gioconda” and the intricate and difficult verse of “Francesca” with all due sympathy, and in the latter case especially—a highly arduous task—with remarkably patient skill. It is not his fault, doubtless, if the feet of his English text strike us as moving with less freedom than those of his original; such being the hard price paid always by the translator who tries for correspondence from step to step, tries for an identical order. Even less is he responsible for its coming still more home to us in a translation that the meagre anecdote here furnishing the subject, and on which the large superstructure rests, does not really lend itself to those developments that make a full or an interesting tragic complexity. Behind the glamour of its immense literary association the subject of “Francesca” is for purposes of essential, of enlarged exhibition delusive and “short.”