Farewell Love!

e Serao (Mme. Scarfoglio) adds, as forcibly as what may be divined from the tenour and material of her books, to the impression that e

l be able to compete with the work of the best men. It is known that the elements of hardship and enforced adventure have not been absent from the career of the

t survivor of an ancient noble family. I know not under what circumstances she came to the Italian home of her father, but it was probably in 1861 or soon afterwards that the unification of Italy permitted his r

t-office to become a reporter and a journalist. To give herself full scope in this new employment, she, as I have been assured, cut short her curly crop of hair, and adopted on occasion male costume. She soon gained a great proficiency in reporting, and advanced to the writing of short sketches and stories for the newspapers. The power and originality of these

she added a continuation in 1885. It is not possible to enumerate all Madame Serao's successive publications, but the powerful romance, La Conquista di Roma ("The Conquest of Rome"), 1882, must not be omitted. This is a very careful and highly finished study of bureaucratic ambition, admirably characterised. Since then she has written in rapid succession several volumes of collected short stories, dealing with the oddities of Neapolit

her employment. Later on, she founded and carried on a newspaper of her own, the Corriere di Roma. After publishing this lively sheet for a few years, she passed to Naples, and became the editor of Le Corriere di Napoli, the paper which enjoys the largest circulation of any journal in the south of Italy.

is distinctly related to that of Daudet. She is an idealist working in the school of realism; she climbs, on scaffolding of minute prosaic observation, to heights which' are emotional and often lyrical. But her most obvious merit is the acutenes