traditions
of the Greek theatre. In 1898 he wrote his _Sogno di un Pomeriggio d'
Autunno_ and _La Gioconda_; in the succeeding year _La Gloria_, an
attempt at contemporary political tragedy which met with no success,
probably through the audacity of the personal and political allusions in
some of its scenes; and then _Francesca da Rimini_ (1901), a perfect
reconstruction of medieval atmosphere and emotion, magnificent in style,
and declared by one of the most authoritative Italian critics--Edoardo
Boutet--to be the first real although not perfect tragedy which has ever
been given to the Italian theatre.

The work of d' Annunzio, although by many of the younger generation
injudiciously and extravagantly admired, is almost the most important
literary work given to Italy since the days when the great classics
welded her varying dialects into a fixed language. The psychological
inspiration of his novels has come to him from many sources--French,
Russian, Scandinavian, German--and in much of his earlier work there is
little fundamental originality. His creative power is intense and
searching, but narrow and personal; his heroes and heroines are little
more than one same type monotonously facing a different problem at a
different phase of life. But the faultlessness of his style and the
wealth of his language have been approached by none of his
contemporaries, whom his genius has somewhat paralysed. In his later
work, when he begins drawing his inspiration from the traditions of
bygone Italy in her glorious centuries, a current of real life seems to
run through the veins of his personages. And the lasting merit of
d'Annunzio, his real value to the literature of his country, consists
precisely in that he opened up the closed mine of its former life as a
source of inspiration for the present and of hope for the future, and
created a language, neither pompous nor vulgar, drawn from every source
and district suited to the requirements of modern thought, yet
absolutely classical, borrowed from none, and, independently of the
thought it may be used to express, a thing of intrinsic beauty. As his
sight became clearer and his purpose strengthened, as exaggerations,
affectations, and moods dropped away from his conceptions, his work
became more and more typical Latin work, upheld by the ideal of an
Italian Renaissance.

ANOA, the native name of the small wild buffalo of Celebes, _Bos_
(_Bubalus_) _depressicornis_, which stand