n verse or prose, to be sold cheap or distributed free about
the streets, would be very useful. If we could find a clever artist
who would enter into the spirit of the thing, we might have them
illustrated."

"It's a capital idea, if only one could carry it out; but if the thing
is to be done at all it must be well done. We should want a first-class
satirist; and where are we to get him?"

"You see," added Lega, "most of us are serious writers; and, with
all respect to the company, I am afraid that a general attempt to be
humorous would present the spectacle of an elephant trying to dance the
tarantella."

"I never suggested that we should all rush into work for which we
are unfitted. My idea was that we should try to find a really gifted
satirist--there must be one to be got somewhere in Italy, surely--and
offer to provide the necessary funds. Of course we should have to know
something of the man and make sure that he would work on lines with
which we could agree."

"But where are you going to find him? I can count up the satirists
of any real talent on the fingers of one hand; and none of them are
available. Giusti wouldn't accept; he is fully occupied as it is. There
are one or two good men in Lombardy, but they write only in the Milanese
dialect----"

"And moreover," said Grassini, "the Tuscan people can be influenced in
better ways than this. I am sure that it would be felt as, to say the
least, a want of political savoir faire if we were to treat this solemn
question of civil and religious liberty as a subject for trifling.
Florence is not a mere wilderness of factories and money-getting like
London, nor a haunt of idle luxury like Paris. It is a city with a great
history------"

"So was Athens," she interrupted, smiling; "but it was 'rather sluggish
from its size and needed a gadfly to rouse it'----"

Riccardo struck his hand upon the table. "Why, we never thought of the
Gadfly! The very man!"

"Who is that?"

"The Gadfly--Felice Rivarez. Don't you remember him? One of Muratori's
band that came down from the Apennines three years ago?"

"Oh, you knew that set, didn't you? I remember your travelling with them
when they went on to Paris."

"Yes; I went as far as Leghorn to see Rivarez off for Marseilles. He
wouldn't stop in Tuscany; he said there was nothing left to do but
laugh, once the insurrection had failed, and so he had better go to
Paris. No doubt he agreed with Signor Grassini that Tuscany i