convictions that are real life and thrilling. The potentiality, the potential life, is there; it must be. We are men and women like other men and women. Life must be struggling beneath the choking surface. Women bear children in agony. Men love, toil, suffer hardships. It is only that our thoughts are directed elsewhere. It may be that if all our press, all our monthly and weekly magazines, and everything else that carries advertisements were wiped out for a single month, we should begin to live. For advertisements are responsible for no small part of the mischief. They waken our sense of romance or of beauty or of charm and then try to convince us that these feelings, which belong to life and have nothing to do with existence, can be thoroughly satisfied by cake made with a special kind of baking powder or by somebody’s chocolates or by perfume with an exotic name. Thus belittling the emotion they conjure up, they make us smile sheepishly at it--and then, in a half-hope, buy the chocolates or the perfume. They deliberately confuse our sense of values. They depict beauty as a genial strumpet for sale to any one at a reasonable price. The word ‘beauty’ is at a discount to-day. One is wary of employing it. The trouble is that in the ’nineties of the last century a very loquacious group of aesthetes made a silly cult of the conception and thereby so cheapened the word itself that even after thirty years it has not quite recovered. This sort of thing always happens when an adjective is turned into a noun. (Not, of course, that this had not happened to the word ‘beautiful’ long before the eighteen-nineties--only never quite so hard). As an adjective it modified facts and was thus related to life; as a noun it is credited with an existence of its own and is thus divorced from life. ‘A beautiful woman’ or ‘a beautiful landscape’ means something very real and fairly definite, but ‘beauty’ all alone by itself means nothing at all, or is at best an abstraction to be used for convenience’ sake, and very carefully, in the midst of earthy life-giving facts. Repeatedly employed, it nauseates the hearer and reveals a lack of genuine feeling in the person who employs it. Where the quality belongs, that the word too often mars, is in life itself; it has no god-like existence of its own. There is no occasion to mention it in a low reverent voice or to turn it into a thin cult. But as just this has been so frequently done I have needed all this apologetic introduction before venturing to say that one of the reasons for which I live in Italy is the varied but almost universal beauty of the landscape that encircles me in nearly any part of that country. I trust it may be evidence of my cultless honesty in the matter when I say that I am not in a perpetual state of thrill about my surroundings (though, to be quite truthful, there do come rare, brief, and unexpected moments of lifting delight in some sudden touch of loveliness), but, rather, feel