clearly perceive our defects and our failings. But this Tamerlane of literary warfare does not keep to the promise of his title. Of his twenty-four chapters, in fact, there are only eleven that can fairly be called "slashings." The other thirteen are either eulogies of men alive or dead, or cordial presentations of men famous or unknown. And this again is scandalous, and sheds the clearest electric light on the fundamental dishonesty of Papini. Any one who has been so unfortunate as to spend five lire in the hope of witnessing a massacre (and in view of the common human instincts one cannot deny a priori that such a purchase is possible) would be justified in suing the slasher for an attempt to collect money under false pretenses. For this wretched book contains pages so steeped in affection and so warm with love—and this not only in the chapters in which he is talking of his friends—that it is hard to believe them written by the same murderous hand that wrote the other pages. If the men praised were acquaintances of Papini, the phenomenon might easily be explained as a case of bribery or blackmail. But in almost all these instances the men are dead, and in many cases they have been dead so long that Papini cannot possibly have known them. We confess that we are powerless to solve this enigma, and we console ourselves with the thought—an ancient and excellent idea—that the soul of man
