House by The-Medlar-Tree by Giovanni Verga. An English edition, The House by the Medlar-Tree (1890) translated by Mary A. Craig was published in the Continental Classics series. This work belongs to the Ciclo dei vinti, together with Mastro-don Gesualdo, La Duchessa di Leyra, L'Onorevole Scipioni and L'uomo di lusso, works which deal with the problem of social and economical advancement. La Duchessa de Leyra remained only a draft, while the last two novels planned for the Ciclo, L'Onorevole Scipioni and L'Uomo di Lusso, were not even started. I Malavoglia deals with a family of fishermen who work and live in Aci Trezza, a small Sicilian village near Catania. The novel possesses a choral aspect, and depicts characters united by the same culture, but divided by ancient rivalries. Any one who loves simplicity or respects sincerity, any one who feels the tie binding us all together in the helplessness of our common human life, and running from the lowliest as well as the highest to the Mystery immeasurably above the whole earth, must find a rare and tender pleasure in this simple story of an Italian fishing village. I cannot promise that it will interest any other sort of readers, but I do not believe that any other sort are worth interesting; and so I can praise Signor Verga's book without reserve as one of the most perfect pieces of literature that I know. When we talk of the great modern movement towards reality we speak without the documents if we leave this book out of the count, for I can think of no other novel in which the facts have been more faithfully reproduced, or with a profounder regard for the poetry that resides in facts and resides nowhere else. Signor Verdi began long ago, in his Vita dei Campi ("Life of the Fields") to give proof of his fitness to live in our time; and after some excursions in the region of French naturalism, he here returns to the original sources of his inspiration, and offers us a masterpiece of the finest realism.