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, largehearted humour; at other times inconclusive, a trifle over-sentimental and unreal, and as though written in haste, and without due regard to probability. not secure it; for the mother was a worldly woman, absorbed in social cares; and only long after, a hopeless invalid, a querulous burden, shethrows 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 highsouled 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, light-hearted, honest girl, who is forced by poverty and her motherless position to travel alone from town to town to fulfil her engagements in various provincial theatres. It is the point of the story that Fulvia, by nature romantic, is betrothed to an upright, steady, but absolutely matter-of-fact German, who has not allowed this tendency any scope. Consequently, she makes to herself imaginary woes when we first encounter her, woes that cause her to think she is tied irrevocably to an unsympathetic, though worthy soul, and which make her long to know warmer feelings. How she finds the lyric enthusiasms of another less true than her "German tin soldier's" mutism, how she returns to the love she had lightly and idly thrown aside, is related with a fineness of perception that makes us regret the more that the dénouement is awkward and strained, marring a book otherwise excellent and out of the common run both in matter and manner. Unquestionably the finest, best worked out and ablest of the author's works is the story that treats with pathos, delicacy, and tenderness of the rise and ultimate extinction of a youthful ideal, and the powerful tale of the North Italian rice fields, in which the Marchesa Colombi has for the first time left the burgher class to write of the peasants whose life she clearly knows well, and with whose sorrows she manifests a virile sympathy. Indeed both these books are more vigorous than their predecessors. The scenes of both are laid in the same portion of Piedmont, the province of Novara; and in the former case we have an excellent series of pictures of the country life led by the small landed proprietors of Northern Italy, lives rather empty and monotonous, that run in a fixed groove out of which escape is only possible by a move into the city— a move many of these persons can rarely afford to make. In Italy there is not the same constant intercourse between town and country dwellers that there is with us, and hence the teeming rich life of the one rarely overflows into the more placid course of the other. The hero of 'The Sunset of an Ideal' is Giovanni Berti, only child of the village doctor,-an ignorant plethoric man, useless as a physician, valued as a boon companion by the notabilities of the neighbourhood. For his sake they club together to educate the boy, who is greatly neglected by his father, and in especial he is noticed by Signor Pedrotti, the village nabob, who invites him to his table during the holidays, on which occasion the lad becomes acquainted with, and enamoured of, the nabob's only daughter. The girl returns his affection, and in due course Giovanni asks the father's consent to their uniona consent refused with ignominy to the poor landless youth who has been educated by his bounty. The insulting terms in which the refusal is couched, Giovanni's assurance that Rachel will be true to him, for he knows her serious loyal nature, call forth all the manly resistance in his character. He sets out for Milan, resolved to make name and fame for himself, so that the father may be proud at last to call him son. The law is the career in which he has embarked, and for many years it is very uphill work, but the image of Rachel is ever before his eyes to comfort and uphold him. The narrative of his struggles and privations is told with that admixture of pathos and gaiety which marks true humour, and with a vividity of description ideal, deeply as its pathos moves that is remarkable. Thus there is us, we acquiesce in its concluan account of the midsummer sul- sion as a necessity that is inevtriness in the city of Milan that itable. We only feel the vast makes us hot to read. After pa- "pity of it," and its sad truth to tience and privations innumerable, life. fortune at last smiles on Giovanni. He defends the cause of a well-known personage, and thus attracts public attention. This is his first step upon the ladder of success, which he now mounts rapidly and steadily. But with success come its temptations. He is courted, drawn into society, succumbs to the fascinations of a fashionable woman, and the image of Rachel fades in his memory. He still looks forward to ultimate marriage with her; but he thinks there is plenty of time, and he is just now interested in the intrigue in which he is engaged. The news he hears by accident that Signor Pedrotti is dead, and that Rachel lives alone in the big castle, together with the discovery of a note from her, written years ago, that never reached him, in which she promises fidelity, arouse his slumbering ideal, and he rushes off to the village to claim the wife he has so long neglected. Most skilfully and artistically is this portion of the story told. He expects to find her changed, of course, but he pictures that it will be a change in which she, like himself, has gained in culture and worldly knowledge. He finds her a worthy, faithful, and excellent person, but a rustic, a villager. Their interview, in which no definite words pass between them, and after which he departs for Milan, though he says he shall call again next day—a promise she knows he will not keep, and he knows he does not mean-is told with remarkable ability, tenderdess, and fine tact; and mournful as is the sudden sunset of this 'In Risaia' furnishes a forcible picture of the sufferings endured by those who work amid the ricefields, where youth and health are sacrificed to a labour that makes women old crones at thirty. The nature of the work obliges them to stand in water that reaches above their knees, while in spring a white veil of mist envelopes all the flat land; and things grow worse rather than better when the heat increases, and there uprises from the stagnant waters miasmas whose stench is often insupportable. Yet to labour in the ricefields is often the only means of livelihood to be gained by the young people of the district; and here they work together for long hours, ill-fed, ill-housed, to return home, after the harvest, feverstricken and pallid. The heroine of the tale, Nanna, the spoilt and only daughter of peasants, goes also to work in the rice- fields. There would be no absolute necessity in her case, if that rigid adherence to outward convention which specially characterises the Italians, and which the peasantry possess to a high degree, did not make it needful that, having reached a marriageable age, she should wear in her hair that aureole of silver pins which, after the fashion of those districts, is regarded as a signal that suitors may come forward. These pins are dear: it needs sixtytwo francs for the father to purchase them, and he, poor man, barely knows how to pay his rent. But to get these pins is a necessity. The whole family put their shoulders to the wheel, and for this cause Nanna goes into the ricefields. How she, who is not robust, catches the fever here and yet returns next season, because the peasants hold that ague does not kill, and, after all, they most of them have it; how she gets it again; how superstitious rites are employed to cure her; how she recovers finally but is quite bald, so that the pins for which she has laboured and spent her breath can never be worn by her,—is told with power, and sufficiently interrupted by lighter incidents not to be too depressingly mournful. The strange admixture of kindness and brutal outspokenness to each other that distinguishes the peasantry is brought into high relief. The situation is summed up in the mother's comment when she finds that Nanna is bald. "What God wills is never too much,' Maddalena had said, and it was the quintessence of Christian resignation; because she saw well, that poor mother, that in that which God willed was comprised for her the end of any pride or maternal joy, and for her daughter a perpetual celibacy and a life of humiliation." And indeed Nanna is made to suffer much rudeness and taunting, and she grows embittered by her enforced celibacy, a condition regarded almost as a reflection upon morality by the lower orders. In the end she does marry a widower, who loves and esteems her, and the whole concludes merrily to the sound of the Christmas bells, the ultimate catastrophe being brought about by some of the peculiar Christmas customs of the people. Space warns us we must close, though we would gladly have said more about this writer of vivacious invention and purity of aim, whose works are deservedly popular in her native land. And herewith we leave our quartette of Italian novelists, trusting that we have shown just cause for the statement made at the outset, that the complaint, frequently made, that there is no good current Italian literature, is unjustified; and that, in the domain of fiction at least, the Italians can measure themselves with their European contemporaries, and not be found wanting. 1 AN EXCURSION TO SOLOMON'S THRONE. AT noon on November 27th last, a small party of British officers reached the highest peak of the Suliman range, and after standing a few minutes on it, all but one descended to their bivouac. The one who remained was a surveyor, a major in the Royal Engineers, well known throughout India for the truth, finish, and beauty of his water-colour paintings from nature. He opened a large white umbrella, and from beneath its shade "shot" with his theodolite various near and distant points, and then, when too benumbed for further work, rejoined his companions. To place that surveyor for two hours on the Takht-i-Suliman the Solomon's Throne of our school geographies 1700 troops, with the necessary complement of campfollowers, mules, and camel-transport, had been marching for the previous twelve days; had stormed a position which, better defended, might have been impregnable; had killed some fifteen to twenty brave mountaineers; and had, by the time the force returned to cantonments, cost the Government of India about half a lakh of rupees. I propose to describe in this paper how the expedition came to be sanctioned, and how it was carried out. Upon the annexation of the Punjab in 1849, the boundary of British India was advanced westwards to the very foot of the mountains of Afghanistan and Bilochistan. In order to minimise the risk of "complications"—that DERA ISMAIL KHÁN, Sept. 27, 1884. word of ill omen to over-cautious Governments-it was ordered that no officer should cross the border on any pretext whatsoever. But that circumstances have occasionally proved too strong for this stay-at-home policy, and that punitory raids and expeditions into the hills have sometimes been forced upon us, we should be to-day as ignorant of the topography and political geography of the mountainous regions immediately beyond our border as we were thirtysix years ago, when "the force of circumstances," or, as Russia calls it, respecting her own advance towards India, "imperious necessity," made the Punjab of Ranjeet Singh a British province. What is termed "the close border system has kept our troops locked up in their frontier cantonments and outposts all the year round, has frequently led independent hilltribes to believe that we were afraid of them, and has more than once conduced to mistakes and even disasters. Two instances by way of illustration will suffice. In 1868, at what is known as the Uhlan Pass affair, a portion of the Kohat garrison stormed a stone breastwork upon a hill-top only four miles from cantonments, and suffered a repulse with the loss of thirtyseven officers and men killed and wounded. When the attack was ordered, cavalry were sent round the hill to cut off the retreat of the defenders as they streamed across the plain. After the repulse had been suffered, it was 1 Major Holdich, R.E., now en route to Herat and Sarrakhs in charge of the Survey Section of the Russo-Afghan Delimitation Commission. |