to whom, indeed, she seems chiefly to address herself. But they are not, on that account, to be deemed namby-pamby food. They form excellent reading for both sexes and all ages; and though many, especially the shorter tales, are written purely to amuse, others have obviously a deeper purpose, though this is never insisted or dwelt on. In this respect the Italian novelists are specially successful. They do not lose themselves in the dreary wastes of didacticism in which we so often go astray. 'Il Tramonto d'un Ideale,' 'Tempesta e Bonaccia,' 'In Risaia,' 'Troppo Tardi,' 'Prima Morire,' are the titles of the Marchesa Colombi's novels; while 'Senz Amore,' 'Serate d'Inverno,' 'Dopo il Caffé,' and 'La Cartella No. 4,' are the collective names under which she has gathered together a number of the short tales she constantly writes in Italian periodicals. Perhaps she even writes a little too much. These stories are of unequal value, – sometimes excellent, full of sparkle and humour – for the Marchesa Colombi has that rare quality in a woman, genuine, good-tempered, large-hearted humour; at other times inconclusive, a trifle over-sentimental and unreal, and as though written in haste, and without due regard to probability.
Her first long tales, 'Troppo Tardi' and 'Prima Morire,' did not show the full force of her powers, and dealt more with the pathetic and sentimental than her later works, in which both her mind and writing are more robust. The first is the simple and melancholy autobiography of a warm-natured old maid, who longed for love, and to whom twice in life it came too late. As a mere child she yearned for her mother's affection, but could not secure it; for the mother was a worldly woman, absorbed in social cares; and only long after, a hopeless invalid, a querulous burden, she throws herself upon her daughter, and desires that they should be all in all to each other. By that time it is too late. The daughter devotes herself with abnegation and heroism, but she has seen through this cold, heartless character, – she can no longer adore her mother as she did in childhood, or delight in the signs of affection she would then have died to receive. Her second disillusion is that love also comes too late. It is a sad tale, full of half tints, with no high lights to relieve the sadness.
'Prima Morire' is a romantic story of the conventional, foreign, seventh commandment type, in which, however, a higher ideal is held up than usual, and in which the man, who is the more high-souled of the two, dies after his first defection from the standard he had held up to himself, expressed in the motto, "Prius mori quam fœdari." The book, which is written in the old-fashioned letter form, a form much affected by the Marchesa Colombi, already reveals here and there touches of that philosophical spirit which animates the writer's mind, together with gaiety and light-heartedness, that curious combination of two qualities held by our northern notions to be incompatible, and of which the Italians are constantly furnishing examples. 'Tempesta e Bonaccia' deals with that burgher phase of professional artistic life, whose very existence we in England are apt to deny – a sphere in which the Marchesa Colombi moves with predilection. Her heroes and heroines are often actors or musicians, and this is the case here. The heroine is Fulvia, an opera-singer, daughter of a poor Government employé – an amiable,
