"Monna Vanna" was his first play in which the action was assigned to a definite period. It was supposed to take place at the end of the fifteenth century. A few years ago, it was well given in this country, Mary Garden impersonating the heroine. Her rendering of the part was widely discussed. "Sister Beatrice" was also produced in America, and "Mary Magdalene" has been translated into English, as well as "The Bluebird." The last named was beautifully given in New York, and was superbly staged and very spectacular. It was so artistic, so original and mysterious, and unlike anything that one had ever seen before, you knew at once that it was the work of Maeterlinck. People swarmed to see it, people went to hear it read, and people took it home to read. Maeterlinck is now over fifty years old, and is at the height of his popularity. He spends the winter at Katchema, near Grasse, in the south of France, the summers at the ancient Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille. During the war he has been lecturing in behalf of his native country. I quote from an address made by him in Milan: "It is not for me to recall here the facts which hurled Belgium into the abyss of glorious distress where she now struggles. She has been punished, as no nation ever was punished, for doing her duty as no nation ever did it. She has saved the world, in the full knowledge that she could not be saved. "She saved the world by throwing herself across the path of the barbarian horde, by allowing herself to be trampled to death in order to give the champions of justice the necessary time, not to succour her--she was aware that she could not be succoured in time--but to assemble troops enough to free Latin civilization from the greatest danger with which it has ever been threatened. "The spectacle of an entire people, great and humble, rich and poor, savants and unlettered, sacrificing themselves deliberately for something which is invisible--that, I declare, has never been seen before, and I say it without fear that any one can contradict me by searching through the history of mankind. They did what had never been done before, and it is to be hoped, for the good of mankind, that no nation may ever be called upon again to do it." Among other well-known Belgian authors Eugène Demolder may be mentioned. In his historical novel, "Le Jardinier de la Pompadour," he has made the eighteenth century live again in pages "vibrant with prismatic colours." A charming characteristic of this book is the exquisite pictures of flowers and woods. The critic Gilbert quotes a page, of which he says, "It opens the story like a whiff of perfumes, for it symbolizes the charm and the freshness of rural France in flower."