Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/161

 Pitrd — Dibliografia. ^ 153

more has been collected and less has been done than in any division of our science.

Finally, we come to the sixth section, on Customs and Superstitions, which fills no less than two thousand seven hundred items. As I hinted before, this is the most masterly part of the volume. Professor Pitr6 has gone through almost all the travellers' books on Italy, he has ransacked the periodicals of the Peninsula, and the characteristic thing about his sections is that so many of the items seem, at first sight, as though they had nothing to do with Folk-lore — and, indeed, Pitre gives a somewhat wider extension to the term than we are accustomed to do in this country.

Works on costume and domestic utensils are included in his all-embracing survey of the Italian Folk. I have failed to notice, however, one topic for which Italy, I feel sure, affords more ample material than any other European country : the gesture-language of the folk is quite an art by itself in Italy, and, if I am not mistaken, there appeared at least one text-book on the art in the seventeenth century, with designs showing the meaning of various folk-gestures. It is, however, possible that I have missed the reference.

Cavaliere Pitre has crowned his life-work with this magnificent bibliographical summary of Italian Folk-lore — ^' Quorum pars maxima fuit.'" No man has lived for the folk and with the folk so much as Cavaliere Pitre : not even the name of Grimm can be put beside his when we regard the completeness of his survey of the Italian folk- mind, and the undivided devotion he has given to the collection of the rich stores of folk-memories in Sicily. But a few more volumes, and the Biblioteca will be com- plete, and at least one folk in Europe will be not wanting in its vates sacer. The Folk-lorists of Europe must wish Cavaliere Pitre continued strength to complete his monu- mental work.

Joseph Jacobs.