only he were to
get himself tight hose and a silk jerkin, he would be as good as any
Florentine burgess. But she will not listen; or, rather, she listens and
laughs. Yes, she sits up in bed at night and laughs herself to death at
the mere thought of him, that is all he gets. But he knows what it is!
There is a fellow who will keep sneaking about her; if Vallera only
catch him near his cottage, won't he give him a taste of his long new
knife! nay, rip him up and throw his bowels, like those of a pig, to dry
on a roof! He is sorry--perhaps he bores her--God bless you, Nencia!--he
had better go and look after his sheep.

All this is not the poetry of the Renaissance peasant; it is the poem
made out of his reality; the songs which Vallera sang in the fields
about his Nencia we must seek in the volume of Tigri; those rispetti and
stornelli of to-day are the rispetti and stornelli of four centuries
ago; they are much more beautiful and poetic than any of Lorenzo's work;
but Lorenzo has given us not merely a peasant's love-song; he has given
us a peasant's thoughts, actions, hopes, fears; he has given us the
peasant himself, his house, his fields, and his sweetheart, as they
exist even now. For Lorenzo is gone, and, greater than he, the paladins
and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and virgins
of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and the very Greek and
Roman heroes of a hundred years ago, the very knights and covenanters of
forty years since, have joined them; but Vallera exists still, and still in
the flesh exists his Nenciozza. Everything changes, except the country
and the peasant. For, in the long farms of Southern Tuscany, with double
row of blackened balcony all tapestried with heavy ingots of Indian
corn, and spread out among the olives of the hillside, up which twists
the rough bullock road protected by its vine trellis; and in the little
farms, with queer hood-shaped double roofs (as if to pull over the face
of the house when it blows hard), and pigeon towers which show that some
day they must have been fortified, all about Florence; farms which I
pass every day, with their sere trees all round, their rough gardens of
bright dahlias and chrysanthemums draggled by the autumn rains--in these
there are, do not doubt it, still Nencias: magnificent creatures, fit
models for Amazons, only just a trifle too full-blown and matronly; but
with real Amazonian limbs, firm and delicate, under their re