Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/96

88 any little eminence of ground. This game forms an appropriate introduction to prisoner's bars (or base), played in Italy and Sicily under the name of a li Palazzi, and most closely resembling our own game.

With this we conclude our gleanings from Dr. Pitrè's charming exegesis. Our object has been throughout this notice, long as it may appear, not to exhaust his treasury, but only to intimate with something like sufficient particularity what are the contents of this very remarkable book. The games described by Dr. Pitrè, exceeding in number three hundred, and not confined to the Italian island only, have presented a task of some magnitude, and could not of course be given in their absolute integrity within our limited space.

The reader doubtless has seen that a very great number of the games so described by us do not admit of even the local restriction implied by Dr. Pitrè, large as that is, but have long ago passed the Alps and taken up their abode amongst us here. When and how did this emigration take place? We know for certain that children's games are not taught by books, they are only passed on from place to place by personal propaganda, the lively indoctrination of young professors into the ready minds of catechumens quite as youthful. Such also must have been the general method through which in its present and final result we find the boys of Surrey and Yorkshire practising a childish folk-lore common to them with their young contemporaries of Sicily and Italy. But under what conditions was this tradition formally initiated? There is no real difficulty, we think, in answering this question—we mean, of course, in a general way. Britain was for nearly four centuries a Latin country, and as we owe to this historical fact the explanation of many other Latin traditions which we have in our midst, we do not see that there need be much repugnance to refer our childish games, Latin as they betray themselves to be, to the same interesting category of cause and effect.

But however this be, we cannot close our notice of this admirable book without calling our readers' attention to an entirely novel and very interesting feature of it, the phototypes taken of boys as they stand engaged in the various games described in the text.