Such books, the products of disease no matter what language they may be written in, quickly circulate from country to country.

Like epidemics they sweep up and down the world, requiring no passports, respecting no frontiers, while benefits travel slowly from people to people, and often lose much in the passage.

D'Annunzio, speaking the universal language--Sin,--has been accepted as the typical Italian by foreigners who know Carducci merely as a name and have perhaps never heard of Fogazzaro.

Yet it is in these men that the better genius of modern Italy has recently expressed itself.

Carducci's international reputation as the foremost living poet in Europe and a literary critic of the first class gains slowly, but its future is secure.