Excerpt from Italica: Studies in Italian Life and Letters IN gathering into a volume these bye products of the past ten or twelve years, I am not unmindful of their fugitive charac ter. But even fugitives may be message bearers. And there are some subjects which must be treated swiftly or not at all, if the passing aspect is to be caught with the fresh ness, vividness, and bias which belong to it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.