Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/90



HIS forms the thirteenth volume of that marvellous collection commenced not many years ago by Dr. Pitrè, and well-known to students of folk-lore under the title of "Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari Siciliane." Of this collection the first three volumes contain popular songs and a study of popular poetry, with a glossary and grammar of the Sicilian dialect and its variations. The four following volumes are a gathering of folk-tales so novel and so interesting that the rest of Europe has as yet been able to furnish nothing in real rivalry to them. The next volumes are devoted to the proverbs of the island contrasted with those of the Italian peninsula. The twelfth volume treats of the public spectacles and festivals of Sicily. The thirteenth is the one now before us.

By this briefest of summaries, the non-Italian reader will see what Dr. Pitrè has been able to achieve in the course of a few revolving years, without effectual aid or suggestion from fellow-students or previous workers in the same field.

Knowing this preliminarily, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the present volume is a worthy pendant to its delightful predecessors. Like them, it is no pensive production of the study and the library; but its author has sought and found his subjects wherever very young, untrammelled Sicily exercises its sportive ingenuity and vents its animal spirits. And the results of these investigations of Dr. Pitrè are fresh as the games themselves and the boys that play them.

Dr. Pitrè insists preliminarily upon the important bearings of his