In Italian schools, beginning with the most elementary, training in composition is diametrically the opposite. There is a model (and such a florid model!) for everything. Shall a sunset be described? (‘No!’ they would have said in an American school). Manzoni (who is never forgotten for a moment) has done this in just the right way on page 9007 of _I Promessi Sposi_. Base your description on his. Never, so far as I can learn, is the child told to describe, as well as he can, exactly and only what he sees. If Manzoni, however, were the only model, imitative Italian prose might be less rhetorical than it is and might contain some reflected vigour; but there are, to mention only two others, Silvio Pellico (who had a love affair in prison with a spider) and De Amicis, who wrote some tolerable books but who also wrote _Cuore_. _Cuore_ is given to every child as soon as the unfortunate creature is able to read, and as soon as he is able to write he is taught to copy its sentiments and style. There are more, and more nauseating, tears shed in _Cuore_ than in all the _Elsie_ books put together. Compared with it, _Immensee_, which, I am told, no German can, or anyway could some years ago, read without weeping, is as stony as the dictionary. I know of no other book so obscene as _Cuore_. No, I withdraw that statement. There is one worse book. It was written by some Englishwoman, is called _The Story of Pigling Bland_, and is about a dear little pig who fell in love with a dear little girl-pig, and gave her peppermints, and watched over her when she fell asleep; but I do not think that it is used as a text-book in English schools. There are models even for letters to be written by a child to its parents. These are the sentiments the child should have; this is the way they should be expressed. I know a charming and intelligent woman who has a daughter of eighteen--like most Italian young girls, almost indistinguishable from American girls of her generation: hard, _chic_, slangy, fast, but without ever losing her head, not an ounce of tenderness in her. ‘See what a delightful letter Elena has written me from her school,’ said the mother proudly to me one day. I read the letter, aghast. ‘Beloved Mamma ... I think of you always, always ... I dream of the hour when we shall be reunited and I can press you again to my heart.’