And it leaves us with a desire to know more about Hroswitha, the “white rose” of the tenth century (if that be really the meaning of her name). Perhaps the Cardinal’s preface will tell us more. One remark occurs. It seems a little significant that a nun should have written all her plays on the one theme of chastity. It must have been an obsession with her, this virtue to which, as Renan said, nature attaches so little importance. And, in hunting her theme, this nun does not scruple to pursue it to the strangest places. She even puts courtesans upon the stage and houses of ill-fame. How on earth did the good lady imagine these unconventual topics? The question suggests some puzzles about the psychology of nuns. But one only has to see _Callimachus_ to know that Hroswitha must have been as pure as snow, or as a white rose, as innocently ignorant, in fact, of what she was writing about as Miss Daisy Ashford when she described an elopement. PAGELLO Long before _Madame Sand_ was produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre more had been written all the world over about the trip of George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Venice in 1833-4 than about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or the campaigns of the Great War. A heavy fine should be imposed on any one who needlessly adds a drop of ink to the vast mass of controversy that has raged round that subject, and I promise to leave the main story, which must be known to every adult man and woman in the two hemispheres, severely alone. But there is a subordinate actor in the story, to whom injustice, I think, has been done on all hands, and whose case it would be an act of the merest decency to reconsider. I mean Pietro Pagello.