EDMONDO DE AMICIS, one of the most attractive prose writers of modern Italy, was born at Oneglia, October 21st, 1846. From 1865 to 1870, he served in the Italian army from which he retired to devote himself to literature. His books of travel have been extensively translated,—a fact due chiefly to the quality of the intellect they express, but also, no doubt, to the method which is illustrated in his “Studies of Paris.” It is a collection of essays on the various phases of Parisian life, written with strength and candor, but without malice, from the standpoint of an observer to whom Parisian habits are still strange and Parisian ethics still unassimilated. It is doubtful if any English or American writer has written of Paris and the Parisians so well and truly as Amicis has done. “They are a frivolous people, but one in whom a noble and resolute word always finds an echo,” he says of the Parisians. As their favorite Voltaire has said so much worse things of them, they are not likely to complain that Amicis does them less than justice when he adds to this that “little by little we persuade ourselves that many of the diseases which we believed to be caused by guilt are here only the efflorescence of a too rich blood.”