Though the great singers seem to come from Germany in these modern days, Italy has held a distinguished place upon the boards for the last half-century by reason of its great tragic actresses, Adelaide Ristori and Eleonora Duse. Ristori was beginning her career in the fifties when she went to Paris, where the great Rachel was in the very midst of her triumph; and there in the French capital, in the very face of bitter rivalry, she was able to prove her ability and make a name for herself. Later, in the United States she met with a most flattering reception, and for a season played with Edwin Booth in the Shakespearean repertoire. Duse first came into public notice about 1895, when her wonderful emotional power at once caused critics to compare her to Bernhardt, and not always to the advantage of the great French tragedienne. At one period her name became linked most unpleasantly with that of the young Italian realist Gabriele d'Annunzio. In modern Italian literature two women stand out conspicuously--Matilda Serao and Ada Negri. The Signora Serao, who began life as a journalist, is to-day the foremost woman writer of fiction in Italy, and her novels, which are almost without exception devoted to the delineation of Neapolitan life, are quite graphic and interesting, though her literary taste is not always good and she sometimes lapses into the commonplace and the vulgar. Also, she inclines somewhat toward the melodramatic, and, like many of her brothers in literature, she is far from free from what may best be termed "cheap sentiment." Ada Negri, who started in her career as a modest school teacher in Lombardy, is a lyric poet of no mean ability. She has taken up the cudgel for the poor and the weak and the oppressed, and so thorough and genuine are her appreciation and understanding of the life of the people, that she seems to have touched many hearts. Singing as she does of the hard lot of the poor, and of the many struggles of life, it is appropriate that the two volumes of her verses which have appeared up to this time should bear the titles _Fatalita_ and _Tempeste_. Many other women have acquired honored positions in literature, and woman's increased activity and prominence in all intellectual branches is a condition which may well excite wonder. While from many points of view unfortunately backward, the women of Italy are beginning to realize their more serious possibilities, and it is safe to say that the more advanced ideas regarding woman's work and her position in society, which come as the inevitable consequence of modern civilization and education, will soon bear fruit here as in other parts of the continent. PART SECOND SPANISH WOMEN CHAPTER XII THE CONDITION OF SPAIN BEFORE THE MOORISH INVASION