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236 Reali di Francia (the one truly Italian romantic epic) or those of Bertoldo (the one truly Italian comic hero). So long and so vast a success cannot be without its reasons, nor can all its reasons be to the discredit of the writer or her devotees.

Her success was obtained honestly, without the trumpeting of newspapers or the fanning of critics, without even the aid of mystery or a poetic pseudonym. She did not call herself the Countess of Lara, nor Phœbe, nor the Sphinx, nor the Queen of Luanto, nor lolanda, nor Cordelia, nor Fate. She was content—being a woman of simple ways, as our friend the paragrapher has it—with the modern and homely name of Carolina Invernizio. And though she married a certain Colonel Quinterno, she died as Carolina Invernizio—at Cuneo, in that sturdy Piedmont where she was born, I believe, in the fateful year of 1860. Her ashes are to be brought to Florence, where first the ways and the hopes of art opened before her. In the half century that witnessed the final resurrection of her fatherland, it was she who rendered Italy independent of foreign importations in the one branch of literature that is so necessary to the mass of the nation—the novel of intrigue and villainy.

Lest it be said that I am too partial to this woman, who has been too much blamed and too much praised (as they said of Voltaire), let me close with the testimony of a keen and