Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/267



N one important branch of folk-lore—folk-songs—Italy has in Count Costantino Nigra as indefatigable a student in the North as Dr. Giuseppe Pitré has proved in the South. The closely printed volume of imperial octavo which heads our notice is a monument of careful and loving, work, the enthusiasm of the artist gilding the toil of the conscientious workman.

Hitherto the folk-songs of Italy have been best known to us by the love-songs, which are the prevailing form of popular rhymes in the central and southern portions of the Peninsula. But the Piedmontese, like all mountain peoples, are stirred in their inner life by rhythmical memories of heroic deeds at least equally with the absorbing and universal claims of love. Hence it is doubtless of right that our author has devoted his chief study to the homely epics which may be said to be almost the speciality of the countrymen of his province. The love-songs however hardly get fair treatment. They are crowded breathlessly into a few pages, without a word of translation, comment, or comparison, and not so much as the space of a line to separate one from another, and suggest to the reader to pause and consider the beauty of their rhapsodies. We are told in the prefatory treatise