ier was in earnest and that force would
be employed against their idol. And it had to come to that, for
the utterly misguided man continued to resist--hoping doubtless
for wholesale desertions in the army and navy--with the
deplorable result that a good many Italians were slain by
Italians. Orders were issued by the Government that all
possible care should be taken of d'Annunzio's person; and
eventually when Rieka was taken by the royalist troops the poet
broke his oath that he would surely die; he announced that
Italy was not worth dying for and it was said that he had
sailed away on an aeroplane. He had accomplished none of his
desires; the town had not become Italian, though he had bathed
it in Italian blood. His overweening personal ambitions had
been shipwrecked on the rock of ridicule, for as he made his
inglorious exit he shouted at the world that he was "still
alive and inexorable." But yet he may have unconsciously
achieved something, for his seizure of what he loved to call
the "holocaust city" provided the extreme Nationalists with a
private stage where--in uniforms of their own design, in cloaks
and feathers and flowing black ties and with eccentric
arrangements of the hair--they could strut and caper and fling
bombastic insults at the authorities in Rome, until the
Government found it opportune to take them in hand. The
greatest Italian poet and one of the greatest imaginative
writers in Europe will now be able to devote himself--if his
rather morbid Muse has suffered no injury--to his predestined
task. Those--the comparatively few that read--whose
acquaintance with this writer's work usually caused them to
regret his methods, could not help admiring his personal
activities, his genius for leadership and his vital fire during
the War. But, once this was over, he relapsed; and expressing
himself very clearly in action, so that he became known to the
many instead of the few, he lived what he previously wrote, and
now it is generally recognized that Gabriel of the
Annunciation, as he calls himself, who produced a row of
obscene and histrionic novels, is a mountebank, a self-deceiver
and a most affected bore. When he came to Rieka he thought fit
to appeal to the England of Milton. And, like him, Milton lived
as he wrote. Milton, Dante and Sophocles--to mention