of living Italian novelists – a writer who may be regarded as a lineal descendant in Apollo from Maiizoni, and who has bridged the cleft 'twixt the old school and the new. Farina does not do homage to any of the fashionable tendencies; he is neither a realist nor a sensationalist; he does not desire to be cramped by the limits of any school. His sphere of observation is the quiet uneventful life of average mortals: no impossible heroes and heroines his; no sensations, no startling adventures or complications, are found in his dramas. Everyday life is the material with which he rears his edifices – the home, the family, his domain. Humdrum some would perhaps disdainfully call the surroundings in which he loves to move, and wherein he is at his best; but from these humdrum materials he extracts poetry, and it is the very charm of his works that he thus appeals to all mankind; for when everything is said and done, most of our lives are humdrum, and the grande passion, the terrible incidents beloved of the romantic school of novelists are so rare as to be false to real life. That Farina makes us see the poetical side of everyday existence is his grand merit, his talent. Quiet domestic love, the material that makes up our daily life, whose expression in literature is as new as it is difficult, is his best inspiration; the painting of a love so different from that sung by Dante and Petrarch, so different from that wild motiveless infatuation of the French romanticists, or of our English Broughton school. Farina's literary and individual physiognomy must be studied in his domestic novels, where author and writer will be found identical. The reason for this can be discovered in the very simple course of his own existence. He himself says – "My artistic life and my domestic life fuse themselves one with another."
Born at Sorso (January 10, 1846), in Sardinia, he was educated for the law. On attaining his degree he married. "Before marrying," he says, "I was no artist, I only dreamed of art. Scarcely married, however, I went to Milan, 'cut' my law books to dedicate myself to literature, or rather to become a novelist. Perhaps my sole merit consists in this, that I only desired to be a novelist and a father, nothing more." This marriage, with a widow some years his senior, brought the sunshine of domestic happiness into the young man's life, ere ever he could have suffered from its lack, and thus prevented him from unworthy squandering of his freshest feelings. His wife, who was to him, in his own words, "inspiratrice, friend, sister, mother, all," was taken from him two years ago, and since her death Farina's pen has been idle. He will resume it, no doubt, but we should not be surprised if he entered a new groove. It is not sorrow and sickness only that keeps him silent just now, it is also perplexity at the direction literature has quite recently taken in Italy. In a letter on this theme he writes to us: –
"To-day there is en vogue the quarter of an hour of sensuous sensation in all art, and literature gives the tone. It will pass, let us hope, for the sake of all those who besides colour see form, who besides sensuous sensation enjoy sentiment, who adore beautiful truth more than truths crude and rude. Truth is one of the conquests of modern art, and it is well; but we must not interpret this conception alla diavola, as it is done to-day in order to deny salvation to so many good and lovely things that have the sole defect of not being within the reach of the comprehension of the vulgar."
His artistic Credo, he says is,
