he tragic splendour of Greece, the
majesty of Rome, were not unknown to them. Far more is it true that
popular poetry in Italy, proceeding from the hearts of uncultivated
peasants and expressing the national character in its simplicity,
displays none of the stuff from which the greatest works of art in
verse, epics and dramas, can be wrought. But within its own sphere of
personal emotion, this popular poetry is exquisitely melodious,
inexhaustibly rich, unique in modern literature for the direct
expression which it has given to every shade of passion.

Signor Tigri's collection,[22] to which I shall confine my attention
in this paper, consists of eleven hundred and eighty-five _rispetti_,
with the addition of four hundred and sixty-one _stornelli_. Rispetto,
it may be said in passing, is the name commonly given throughout Italy
to short poems, varying from six to twelve lines, constructed on the
principle of the octave stanza. That is to say, the first part of the
rispetto consists of four or six lines with alternate rhymes, while
one or more couplets, called the _ripresa_, complete the poem.[23]
The stornello, or ritournelle, never exceeds three lines, and owes
its name to the return which it makes at the end of the last line to
the rhyme given by the emphatic word of the first. Browning, in his
poem of 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' has accustomed English ears to one common
species of the stornello,[24] which sets out with the name of a
flower, and rhymes with it, as thus:

Fior di narciso.
Prigionero d'amore mi son reso,
Nel rimirare il tuo leggiadro viso.

The divisions of those two sorts of songs, to which Tigri gives names
like The Beauty of Women, The Beauty of Men, Falling in Love,
Serenades, Happy Love, Unhappy Love, Parting, Absence, Letters, Return
to Home, Anger and Jealousy, Promises, Entreaties and Reproaches,
Indifference, Treachery and Abandonment, prove with what fulness the
various phases of the tender passion are treated. Through the whole
fifteen hundred the one theme of Love is never relinquished. Only two
persons, 'I' and 'thou,' appear upon the scene; yet so fresh and so
various are the moods of feeling, that one can read them from first to
last without too much satiety.

To seek for the authors of these ditties would be useless. Some of
them may be as old as the fourteenth century; others may have been
made yesterday. Some are the native product of the Tuscan mountain
villages, especially of th