The Italians say: "_inglese italianizzato diavolo incarnato_," and this is also true of Americans and may be true of Teutons. Two Italian girls who spent a season in London described to me their attempts to imitate what they called "_lo stiff_," the stiff reserved manner of the Englishman of breeding. They failed, it seems, woefully, for they could not acquire "_lo stiff_" and they lost their own pretty manners. So it is with the Anglo-Saxon in Italy. We have not their _finesse_, or the mental and temperamental qualities which balance their moral defects; the Englishman adopts these with interest and his national virtues are shed like a garment. It is therefore perhaps fortunate that Italian women give Englishmen small encouragement to turn themselves into _diavoli incarnati_; for it must be recorded that the English and American wife in Italy runs no such risk: she remains herself, the national character does not wear off like a poor veneer, she does not outrage native susceptibilities without acquiring native graces, and distinguished women of our race have for the past two hundred years brought their native virtues to Italy while adopting Italian causes with an enthusiasm which did not yield even to that of Italians themselves. In Rome the English wife of General La Marmora, the two Talbots who became Gwendoline Borghese and Mary Doria, the American wife of Garibaldi, and the Scotch wife of the triumvir Aurelio Saffi (still alive), all played a conspicuous Italian role. There are more people with great temperaments among the Latin races than among ourselves; and as it is "plenty of temperament" which is wanted for the creations of art it is not difficult to understand why the Italians are artistic and we are not. And the Italians are a people of artists. In England where one man in a thousand may possess the artistic temperament it is difficult to realise the keen observation, the appreciation of technique for its own sake, the intuitive way of gauging and grouping the data of the senses, the balance and proportion implied in a race where one man in ten judges as an artist. Wagner expresses, in a letter to Boito, his admiration of the Italian attitude to art--the open-mindedness and delicate feeling in artistic questions which make him "understand again," after a visit there, "the matchlessly productive spirit to which the new world owes all its art since the Renaissance." When Edward VII. visited Rome the _Times_ and other English newspapers compared the consummate yet simple scheme of decoration with the tasteless and meaningless banner and bunting displays which London witnesses on similar occasions. The love of beauty--the Greek horror of deformity--is so strong with this people that its imperatives take precedence of moral considerations--of pity, delicacy, kindliness. The uneducated Italian shows his instinctive disgust at what is ugly or horrible and, as we have seen, no prevenient idealism checks the impulse.