obscene and degenerate books of Gabriele d'Annunzio. Such books, the
products of disease no matter what language they may be written in,
quickly circulate from country to country. Like epidemics they sweep up
and down the world, requiring no passports, respecting no frontiers,
while benefits travel slowly from people to people, and often lose much
in the passage. D'Annunzio, speaking the universal language--Sin,--has
been accepted as the typical Italian by foreigners who know Carducci
merely as a name and have perhaps never heard of Fogazzaro. Yet it is in
these men that the better genius of modern Italy has recently expressed
itself. Carducci's international reputation as the foremost living poet
in Europe and a literary critic of the first class gains slowly, but its
future is secure. Thanks to the wider circulating medium of fiction,
Fogaz-* *zaro's name is a household word in thousands of Italian
families, and he combines in his genius so many rare and important
strands that the durability of his literary renown cannot be questioned.


II

Antonio Fogazzaro, the most eminent Italian novelist since Manzoni, was
born at Vicenza on March 25th, 1842. He was happy in his parents, his
father, Mariano Fogazzaro, being a man of refined tastes and sound
learning, while his mother, Teresa Barrera, united feminine sweetness
with wit and a warm heart. From childhood they influenced all sides of
his nature, and when the proper time came they put him in charge of a
wise tutor, Professor Zanella, who seems to have divined his pupil's
talents and the best way to cultivate them. Young Fogazzaro, having
completed his course in the classics went on to the study of the law,
which he pursued first in the University of Padua and then at Turin,
where his father had taken up a voluntary exile. For Vicenza, during the