CHAPTER IV. POPULAR SECULAR POETRY.

Separation between Cultivated Persons and the People—Italian despised by the Learned—Contempt for Vernacular Literature—The Certamen Coronarium—Literature of Instruction for the Proletariate—Growth of Italian Prose—Abundance of Popular Poetry—The People in the Quattrocento take the Lead—Qualities of Italian Genius—Arthurian and Carolingian Romances—I Reali di Francia—Andrea of Barberino and his Works—Numerous Romances in Prose and Verse—Positive Spirit—Versified Tales from Boccaccio—Popular Legends—Ginevra degli Almieri—Novel of Il Grasso—Histories in Verse—Lamenti—The Poets of the People—Cantatori in Banca—Antonio Pucci—His Sermintesi—Political Songs—Satires—Burchiello—His Life and Writings—Dance-Songs—Derived from Cultivated Literature, or produced by the People—Poliziano—Love-Songs—Rispetti and Stornelli—The Special Meaning of Strambotti—Diffusion of this Poetry over Italy—Its Permanence—Question of its Original Home—Intercommunication and Exchange of Dialects—Incatenature and Rappresaglie—Traveling in Medieval Italy—The Subject-Matter of this Poetry—Deficiency in Ballad Elements—Canti Monferrini—The Ballad of L'Avvelenato and Lord Ronald.

During the fifteenth century there was an almost complete separation between the cultivated classes and the people. Humanists, intent upon the exploration of the classics, deemed it below their dignity to use the vulgar tongue. They thought and wrote in Latin, and had no time to bestow upon the education of the common folk. A polite public was formed, who in the Courts of princes and the palaces of noblemen amused themselves with the ephemeral literature of pamphlets, essays, and epistles in the Latin tongue. For these well-educated readers Poggio and Pontano wrote their Latin novels. The same learned audience applauded the gladiators of the moment, Valla and Filelfo, when they descended into the arena and plied each other with pseudo-Ciceronian invectives. To quit this refined circle, and address the vulgar crowd, was thought unworthy of a man of erudition. Even Alberti, as we have seen, felt bound to apologize for sending his Teogenio in Italian to Lionello d'Este. Only here and there a humanist of the first rank is found who, like Bruni, devoted a portion of his industry to the Italian lives of Dante and Petrarch, or like Filelfo, lectured on the Divine Comedy, or again like Landino, composed a Dantesque commentary in the mother tongue. Moreover, Dante and Petrarch passed for almost classical; and in nearly all such instances of condescension, pecuniary interest swayed the scholar from his wonted orbit. It was want of skill in Latin rather than love for his own idiom which induced Vespasiano to pen his lives of great men in Italian. Not spontaneous inspiration, but the whim of a ducal patron forced Filelfo to use terza rima for his worthless poem on S. John, and to write a commentary upon Petrarch in the vernacular.[279] One of this man's letters reveals the humanist's contempt for the people's language, and his rooted belief in the immortality of Latin. It is worth translating.[280] "I will answer you," he says, "not in the vulgar language, as you ask, but in Latin and our own true speech; for I have ever had an abhorrence for the talk of grooms and servants, equal to my detestation of their life and manners. You, however, call that dialect vernacular which, when I use the Tuscan tongue, I sometimes write. All Italians agree in praise of Tuscan. Yet I only employ it for such matters as I do not choose to transmit to posterity. Moreover, even that Tuscan idiom is hardly current throughout Italy, while Latin is far and wide diffused throughout the habitable world." From this interesting epistle we gather that even professional scholars in the middle of the fifteenth century recognized Tuscan as a quasi-literary language, superior in polish to the other Italian dialects, but not to be compared for dignity and durability with Latin. It also proves that the language of Boccaccio was for them almost a foreign speech.

This attitude of learned writers produced a curious obtuseness of critical insight. Niccolò Niccoli, though he was a Florentine, called Dante "a poet for bakers and cobblers." Pico della Mirandola preferred Lorenzo de' Medici's verses to Petrarch. Landino complained, not, indeed, without good reason in that century, that the vulgar language could boast of no great authors. Filippo Villani, in the proem to his biographies, apologized for his father Matteo, who exerted humble faculties and scanty culture to his best ability. Lorenzo de' Medici defended himself for paying attention to an idiom which men of good judgment blamed for "lowness, incapacity and unworthiness to deal with high themes or grave material." Benedetto Varchi, who lived to be an excellent though somewhat cumbrous writer of Italian prose, gives this account of his early training[281]: "I remember that when I was a lad, the first and strictest rule of a father to his sons, and of a master to his pupils, was that they should on no account and for no object read anything in the vulgar speech (non legesseno cose volgari, per dirlo barbaramente come loro); and Master Guasparre Mariscotti da Marradi, who was my teacher in grammar, a man of hard and rough but pure and excellent manners, having once heard, I know not how, that Schiatta di Bernardo Bagnesi and I were wont to read Petrarch on the sly, gave as a sound rating for it, and nearly expelled us from his school." Some of Varchi's own stylistic pedantries may be attributed to this Latinizing education.

Even when they wrote their mother tongue, it followed that the men of humanistic culture had a false conception of style. Alberti could not abstain from Latinistic rhetoric. Cristoforo Landino went the length of asserting that "he who would fain be a good Tuscan writer, must first be a Latin scholar." The Italian of familiar correspondence was mingled in almost equal quantities with Latin phrases. Thus Poliziano, writing from Venice to Lorenzo de' Medici, employs the following strange maccaronic jargon[282]:

Visitai stamattina Messer Zaccheria Barbero; e mostrandoli io l'affezione vostra ec., mi rispose sempre lagrimando, et ut visum est, de cuore; risolvendosi in questo, in te uno spem esse. Ostendit so nosse quantum tibi debeat; sicchè fate quello ragionaste, ut favens ad majora. Quello Legato che torna da Roma, et qui tecum locutus est Florentiæ, non è punto a loro proposito, ut ajunt.

Poliziano, however, showed by his letters to the ladies of the Medicean family, and by some sermons composed for a religious brotherhood of which he was a member, that he had no difficulty in writing Tuscan prose of the best quality.[283] It seems to have been a contemptuous fashion among men of learning, when they used the mother tongue for correspondence, to load it with Latin—just as a German of the age of Frederick proved his superiority by French phrases. The acme of this affectation was reached in the Hypnerotomachia, where the vice of Latinism sought perpetuation through the printing press. Meanwhile, the genius of the Florentine people was saving Italian literature from the extreme consequences to which caricatures of this kind, inspired by humanistic pedantry and sciolism, exposed it.

A characteristic incident of the year 1441 brings before us a set of men who, though obscure and devoted to the service of the common folk, exercised no slight influence over the destinies of the Italian language. After the reinstatement of the Medici, and while Alberti was resident in Florence, it occurred to him to propose the prize of a silver crown for the best poem upon Friendship, in the vulgar tongue. Piero de' Medici approving of this scheme, it was arranged that the contest for the prize should take place in S. Maria del Fiore, the competitors reciting their own compositions. The secretaries of Pope Eugenius IV. consented to be umpires. Eight poets entered the lists—Michele di Noferi del Gigante, Francesco d'Altobianco degli Alberti, and six others not less unknown to fame. We still possess their compositions in octave stanzas, terza rima, sapphics, hexameters and lyric strophes.[284] The poems were so bad that even the judges of that period refused to award the crown; nor could the most indulgent student of forgotten literature arraign this verdict for severity. Yet the men who engaged in Alberti's Certamen Coronarium, as it was called, fairly represented a class of literary workers, who occupied a middle place between the learned and the laity, and on whom devolved the task of writing for the people.

Since that unique moment in the history of Tuscan civilization when the lyrics of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti were heard upon the lips of blacksmiths, the artisans of Florence had not wholly lost their thirst for culture. Style and erudition retired into the schools of the humanists and the studies of the nobles. But this curiosity of the volgo, as Boccaccio contemptuously called them, was satisfied by the production of a vernacular literature, which brought the ruder elements of knowledge within their reach. Mention has already been made of Latini's Tesoro and Tesoretto, Uberti's Dittamondo and similar encyclopædic works of medieval learning. To these may now be added Leonardo Dati's cosmographical history in octave stanzas, the Schiavo da Bari's aphorisms on morality, and Pucci's terza rima version of Villani's Chronicle. Genealogical poems on popes, emperors and kings; episodes from national Italian history; novels, romances and tales of chivalry; pious biographies; the rudiments of education, from the Dottrinale of Jacopo Alighieri down to Feo Belcari's A B C, helped to complete the handicraftsman's library. Further to describe this plebeian literature is hardly necessary. The authors advanced no pretensions to artistic elegance or stateliness of style. They sought to render knowledge accessible to unlettered readers, or to please an open-air audience with stirring and romantic narratives. Their language broke only at rare intervals into poetry and rhetoric, when the subject-matter forced a note of unaffected feeling from the improvisatore. Yet it has always the merit of purity, and, in point of idiom, is superior to the Latinistic periods of Alberti. By means of the neglected labors of these nameless writers, the style of the fourteenth century, so winning in its infantine grace, was gradually transformed and rendered capable of stronger literary utterance. Those who have studied a single prose-work of this period—I Reali di Francia, for instance, or Belcari's Vita del Beato Colombino, or the Governo della Famiglia ascribed to Pandolfini—will be convinced that a real progress toward grammatical cohesion and massiveness of structure was made during those years of the fifteenth century which are usually counted barren of achievement by literary historians. Italian prose had entered on the period of adolescence, leading to the manhood of Machiavelli.

The popular poetry of the quattrocento is still more interesting than its prose. No period of Italian history was probably more fruitful of songs poured forth from the very heart of the people, on the fields and in the city. The music of these lyrics still lingers about the Tuscan highlands and the shores of Sicily, where much that now passes for original composition is but the echo of most ancient melody stored in the retentive memory of peasants. To investigate the several species of this poetry, together with kindred works of prose fiction, under the several classes of (i) epics and romances, (ii) histories in verse and satires, (iii) love-poems, (iv) religious lyrics, and (v) dramas, will be my object in the present and the following chapters. This survey of popular literature forms a necessary introduction to the renascence which was simultaneously effected for Italian at Florence, Ferrara and Naples during the last years of the century. The material prepared by the people was then resumed and artistically elaborated by learned authors.

It has been well said that Italian poetry exhibits a continual reciprocity of exchange between the cultivated classes and the proletariate. In this respect the literature of the Italians corresponds to their fine art. Taken together with painting, sculpture, and music, it offers a more complete embodiment of the national spirit than can be shown by any other modern race. Dante's Francesca and Count Ugolino, Ariosto's golden cantos, and the romantic episodes of the Gerusalemme are known by heart throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula. The people have appropriated these masterpieces of finished art. On the other hand, the literary poets have been ever careful to borrow subjects, forms, and motives from the populace. The close rapport which thus connects the tastes and instincts of the proletariate with the culture of the aristocracy, is rooted in peculiar conditions of Italian society. Traditions of a very ancient civilization, derived without apparent rupture from the Roman age, have penetrated and refined the whole nation. From the highest to the lowest, the Italians are born with sensibility to beauty. This people and its poets live in sympathy so vital that, though their mutual good understanding may have been suspended for short intervals, it has never been broken. The vibrations of intercourse between the peasant and the learned writer are incessant; and if we notice some intermittency of influence on one side or the other, it is only because at one epoch the destinies of the national genius were committed to the people, at another to the cultivated classes. In the fifteenth century, one of these temporary ruptures occurred. The Revival of Learning had to be effected by an isolation of the scholars. Meanwhile, the people carried on the work of literary transmutation, which was to connect Boccaccio with Pulci and Poliziano. Their instinct rejected all elements alien to the national temperament. Out of the many models bequeathed by the fourteenth century, only those which suited the sensuous realism of the Florentines survived. The traditions of Ciullo d'Alcamo and Jacopone da Todi, of Rustico di Filippo and Lapo Gianni, of Folgore da S. Gemignano and Cene dalla Chitarra, of Cecco Angiolieri and Guido Cavalcanti, of Boccaccio and Sacchetti, of Ser Giovanni and Alesso Donati, triumphed over the scholasticism of those learned poets—"half Provençal and half Latin, half chivalrous, and half bourgeois, half monastic and half sensual, half aristocratic and half plebeian"[285]—who had unsuccessfully experimentalized in the dawn of Tuscan culture. The artificial chivalry, lifeless mysticism, barren metaphysics, and hypocritical piety of the rhyming doctors were eliminated. Common sense expressed itself in a reaction against their conventional philosophy. Giotto's blunt critique of Franciscan poverty, Orcagna's burlesque definition of Love, not as a blind boy with wings and arrows, but thus:

L'amore è un trastullo; Non è composto di legno nè d'osso; E a molta gente fa rompere il dosso:

struck the keynote of the new literature.[286] It is true that much was sacrificed. Both Dante and Petrarch seemed to be forgotten. Yet this was inevitable. Dante represented a bygone age of faith and reason. Petrarch's humanity was too exquisitely veiled. The Florentine people required expression more simple and direct, movement more brusque, emotion of a coarser fiber. Meanwhile the Divine Comedy and the Canzoniere were the inalienable possessions of the nation. They had already taken rank as classics.

The Italians had no national Epic, if we except the Æneid. We have seen how the romances of Charlemagne and Arthur were imported with the languages of France and Provence into Northern Italy, and how they passed into the national literature of Lombardy and Tuscany.[287] Both cycles were eminently popular. The Tavola Ritonda ranks among the earliest monuments of Tuscan prose.[288] The Cento Novelle contain frequent references to Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram. Folgore da S. Gemignano compares the members of his Joyous Company to King Ban's children. In the Laberinto d'Amore Boccaccio speaks of Arthurian tales as the favorite studies of idle women, and Sacchetti bids his blacksmith turn from Dante to legends of the Round Table. Yet there is no doubt that from a very early period the Carolingian cycle gained the preference of the Italian people.[289] It is also noticeable that, not the main legend of Roland, but the episode of Rinaldo, and other offshoots from the history of the Frankish peers, furnished plebeian poets with their favorite material.[290] MSS. written in Venetian and Franco-Italian dialects before the middle of the fourteenth century attest to the popularity of these subordinate romances, and reveal an independent handling of the borrowed subject. In form they do not diverge widely from French originals. Yet there is one prominent characteristic which distinguishes the Italian rifacimenti. A Christian hero falls in love with a pagan heroine on pagan soil. His pursuit of her, their difficulties and adventures, and the evangelization of her people by the knightly lover, furnish a series of incidents which recur with singular persistence.[291] When the romances in question had been translated into Tuscan, a destiny of special splendor was reserved for two of them, in no way distinguished by any apparent merit above the rest. These were the tales of Buovo d'Antona, of which we possess an early version in octave stanzas, and of Fioravante, which exists in still older prose. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Buovo and the Fioravante, together with other material drawn from the Carolingian epic, were combined into the great prose work called I Reali di Francia.[292] Since its first appearance to the present day, this romance has never ceased to be the most widely popular of all books written in Italian. "There is nothing," says Signor Rajna, "so assiduously read from the Alps to the furthest headlands of Sicily. Wherever a reader exists, there is it certain to be found in honor."[293] Not the earliest but the latest product of a long elaboration of romantic matter by the people, it seems to have assimilated the very essence of the popular imagination. When we inquire into its authorship, we find good reason to ascribe it to Andrea dei Mangalotti of Barberino in the Val d'Elsa, one of the best and most indefatigable workmen for the literary market of the proletariate.[294] It was he who compiled the Aspromonte, the Aiolfo, the seven books of Storie Nerbonesi, the Ugone d'Avernia, and the Guerino il Meschino, reducing these tales from elder poems and prose sources into Tuscan of sterling lucidity and vigor, and attempting, it would seem, to embrace the whole Carolingian cycle in a series of episodical romances.[295] Guerino il Meschino rivaled for a while the Reali in popularity; but for some unknown reason, which would have to be sought in the instinctive partialities of the people, it was gradually superseded by the latter. The Reali alone has descended in its original form through the press to this century.[296]

Andrea da Barberino, if we are right in ascribing the Reali to his pen, conferred a benefit on the Italians parallel to that which the English owed to Sir Thomas Mallory in his "Mort d'Arthur." He not only collected and condensed the scattered tales of numerous unknown predecessors, but he also bequeathed to the nation a monument of unaffected prose at a moment when the language was still ingenuous and plastic. It would be not uninteresting to compare the fate of the Reali with that of our own "Mort d'Arthur." The latter was the more artistic performance of the two. It achieved a truer epical unity, and was composed in a richer, more romantic style. The former remained episodical and incomplete; and its language, though solid and efficient, lacked the charm of Mallory's all golden prose. Yet the Reali is still a household classic. It is found in every contadino's cottage, and supplies the peasantry with subjects for their Maggi. The "Mort d'Arthur," on the contrary, has become the plaything of medievalizing folk in modern England. Read for its unique beauty by students, it is still unknown to the people, and, in the opinion of the dull majority, it is reckoned inferior to Tennyson's smooth imitations.

When we come to consider the romantic poems of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, we shall be able to estimate the service rendered by men like Andrea da Barberino to polite Italian literature. The popularity of the cycle to which the Reali belonged, decided the choice of the Carolingian epic by the poets of Florence and Ferrara. Nor were the above-mentioned romances by any means the only works of their kind produced for a plebeian audience in the quattrocento. It is enough to mention La Regina Ancroja, La Spagna, Trebisonda con la Vita e Morte di Rinaldo. Both in prose and verse an abundant literature of the kind was manufactured. Without being positively burlesqued, the heroes of chivalrous story were travestied to suit the taste of artisans and burghers. The element of the marvelous was surcharged; comic and pathetic episodes were multiplied; beneath the armor of the Paladins Italian characters were substituted with spontaneous malice for the obsolete ideals of feudalism. It only needed a touch of conscious irony to convert the material thus elaborated by the people into the airy fabric of Ariosto's art. At the same time the form which the epic of romance was destined to assume, had been determined. The streets and squares of town and village rang with the chants of improvisatori, turning the prose periods of Andrea da Barberino and his predecessors into wordy octave stanzas, rehandling ancient Chansons de Geste, and adapting the mannerism of chivalrous minstrelsy to the requirements of a subtle-witted Tuscan crowd. The old-fashioned invocations of God, Madonna, or some saint were preserved at the beginning of each canto, while the audience received their congé from the author at its close. When the poems thus produced were committed to writing, the plebeian author feigned at least the inspiration of a bard.

While the traditions of medieval song were thus preserved, the prose-romances followed, as closely as possible, the style of a chronicle, and aimed at the verisimilitude of authentic history. The Reali, for example, opens with this sentence: "Fuvvi in Roma un santo pastore della Chiesa, che aveva nome papa Silvestro." The Fioravante, recently edited by Signor Rajna, begins: "Nel tempo che Gostantino imperadore regiea & mantenea corte in Roma grandissima." This parade of historic seriousness, observed by the subsequent romantic poets, contributed in no small measure to the irony at which they aimed. But with the story-tellers of the quattrocento it was no mere affectation. Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century, they treated legend from the standpoint of experience. It was due in no small measure to this circumstance that the Italian prose-romances are devoid of charm. Nowhere do we find in them that magic touch of poetry which makes the forests, seas and castles of the "Mort d'Arthur" enchanted ground. Notwithstanding all their extravagances, they remain positive in spirit, presenting the material of fancy in the sober garb of fact. The Italian genius lacked a something of imaginative potency possessed in overflowing measure by the Northern nations. It required the stimulus of satire, the infusion of idyllic sentiment, the consciousness of art, to raise the romantic epic to the height it reached in Ariosto. Then, and not till then, when the matter of the legend had become the sport of the æsthetic sense, were the inexhaustible riches of Italian fancy, dealing delicately and humorously with a subject which could no longer be apprehended seriously, revealed to the world in a masterpiece of beauty. But that work of consummate art was what it was, by reason of the master's wise employment of a style transmitted to him through generations of plebeian predecessors.

The same positive and workmanly method is discernible in the versified novelle of this period.[297] The popular poets were wont to recast tales from the Decameron and other sources in octave stanzas. Of such compositions we have excellent specimens in Girolamo Benivieni's version of the novel of Tancredi, and in an anonymous rhymed paraphrase of Patient Grizzel.[298] The latter is especially interesting when we compare it with the series of panels attributed to Pinturicchio in the National Gallery, where a painter of the same period has exercised his fancy in illustrating the legend which the poet versified. Detached episodes of semi-mythical Florentine history were similarly treated. Allusion has already been made to the love-tale of Ippolito and Leonora, attributed on doubtful grounds to Alberti.[299] But by far the most beautiful is the story of Ginevra degli Almieri, told in octave stanzas by Agostino Velletti.[300] This poem has rare value as a genuine product of the plebeian muse. The heroine Ginevra's father was a pork-butcher, says the minstrel, and lived in the Marcato Vecchio, where he carried on the best business of the sort in Florence. It is also important for students of comparative literature, because it clearly illustrates the difference between Italian and Northern treatment of an all but contemporary incident. The events narrated are supposed to have really happened in the year 1396. On the Scotch Border they would have furnished materials for a ballad similar to Gil Morrice or Clerk Saunders. In Florence they take the form of a novella, and the novella is expanded in octave stanzas.[301] Ginevra had two lovers, Antonio de' Rondinelli and Francesco degli Agolanti. Antonio loved her the more tenderly; but her parents gave her in marriage to Francesco. Soon after the ceremony, she sickened and fell into a trance; and since Florence was then threatened with the plague, the girl was buried over-hastily in this deep slumber. Her weeping parents laid her in a cippus or avello between the two doors of S. Reparata, where the workmen, unable to finish their job before sunset, left the lid of her sepulcher unsoldered. In the middle of the night Ginevra woke, and discovered to her horror that she had been sent to the grave alive. Happily the moon was shining, and a ray of light fell through a chink upon her bier. She arose, wrapped her shroud around her, and struggled from her marble chest into the silent cathedral square. Giotto's bell tower rose above her, silvery and beautiful, and slender in the moonlight. Like a ghost, sheeted in her grave-clothes, Ginevra ran through the streets, and knocked first at Francesco's door. He was seated awake by the fireside, sorrowing for his young bride's loss:

Andonne alla finestra e aprilla un poco: Chi è là? Chi batte? Io son la tua Ginevra; Non m'odi tu? Col suo parlar persevera.

Her husband doubts not that it is a spirit calling to him, bids her rest till masses shall be said for her repose, and shuts the window. Then she turns to her mother's house. The mother, too, is sitting sorrowful by the hearth, when she is startled by Ginevra's cry:

E spaventata e piena di paura Disse: va in pace, anima benedetta, Bella figliuola mia, onesta e pura; E riserrò la finestra con fretta.

Rejected by husband and mother, Ginevra next tries her uncle, and calls on him for succor in God's name:

Fugli risposto; anima benedetta, Va che Dio ti conservi in santa pace.

The poor wretch now feels that there is nothing left for her but to lie down on the pavement and die of cold. But while she is preparing herself for this fate, she bethinks her of Antonio. To his house she hurries, cries for aid, and falls exhausted on the doorstep. Then comes the finest touch in the poem. Antonio knows Ginevra's voice; and loving her so tenderly, he hurries with delight to greet her risen from the grave. He alone has no fear and no misgiving; for love in him is stronger than death. At the street door, when he reaches it, he finds no ghost, but his own dear lady yet alive. She is half frozen and unconscious; yet her heart still beats. How he calls the women of his household to attend her, prepares a bed, and feeds her with warm soups and wine, and how she revives, and how Antonio claims her for his wife, and wins his cause against her former bridegroom in the Bishop's court, may be read at length in the concluding portion of the tale. The intrinsic pathos of this story makes it a real poem; for though the wizard's wand of Northern imagination lay beyond the grasp of the Italian genius, the novelle are rarely deficient in poetry evoked by sympathy with injured innocence and loyal love.

Of truly popular novelle belonging to the fifteenth century, none is racier or more characteristic than the anonymous tale of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo.[302] It is written in pure Florentine dialect, and might be selected as the finest extant specimen of homespun Tuscan humor. We have already seen that the point of Sacchetti's stories is nearly always a practical joke, where comedy combines with heartless cruelty in almost equal parts. The theme of Il Grasso is a superlatively comic beffa of this sort, played by Filippo Brunelleschi on a friend of his. The incident is dated 1409, and is supposed to have really occurred. Manetto Ammannatini, a tarsiatore or worker in carved and inlaid wood, was called Il Grasso, because he was a fine stout fellow of twenty-eight years. He had his bottega on the Piazza S. Giovanni and lived with his brother in a house hard by. Among his most intimate associates were Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, Donatello, intagliatore di marmi, Giovanni di Messer Francesco Rucellai, and others, partly gentlemen and partly handicraftsmen; for there was no abrupt division of classes at Florence, and this story shows how artisans and men of high condition dwelt together in good fellowship. The practical joke devised by Brunelleschi consisted in persuading Manetto that he had been changed into a certain Matteo. The whole society of friends were in the secret, and the affair was so cunningly conducted that at last they attained the desired object. They caused Manetto to be arrested for a debt of Matteo, sent Matteo's brothers and then the clergyman of the parish to reason with him on his spendthrift habits, and fooled him so that he fairly lost his sense of identity. The whole series of incidents, beginning with Manetto's indignant assertion of his proper personality, passing through his doubts, and closing with his mystification, is conducted by fine gradations of irresistibly comic humor. At last the poor man resolves to quit Florence and to seek refuge with King Mathias Corvinus in Hungary; which it seems he subsequently did, in company with a certain Lo Spano. There is no reason to suppose that this practical joke did not actually take place.

I have enlarged upon the novella of Il Grasso, because it is typical of the genuinely popular literature, written to delight the folk of Florence, appealing to their subtlest as well as broadest sense of fun, and bringing on the scene two famous artists, Brunelleschi, whose cupola is "raised above the heavens," and Donatello, whose S. George seems stepping from his pedestal to challenge all the evil of the world and conquer it. Unfortunately, our published collections are not rich in novels of this date; and next to the anonymous tale of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo it is difficult to cite one of at all equal value, till we come to Luigi Pulci's story of Messer Goro and Pius II. This is really a satire on the Sienese, whom Pulci represents with Florentine malice as almost inconceivably silly. The Tuscan style is piquant in the extreme, and the picture of manners very brilliant.[303]

From epical and narrative literature to poems written for the people upon contemporary events and public history, is not an unnatural transition. These compositions divide themselves into Storie and Lamenti. We have abundant examples of both kinds in lyric measures and also in octave stanzas and terza rima.[304] A few of their titles will suffice to indicate their scope. Il Lamento di Giuliano de' Medici relates the tragic ending of the Pazzi conspiracy; Il Lamento del Duca Galeazzo Maria tells how that Duke was murdered in the church of S. Stefano at Milan; El Lamento di Otranto is an echo of the disaster which shook all Italy to her foundations in the year 1480; El Lamento e la Discordia de Italia universale sounds the death-note of Italian freedom in the last years of the century. After that period the Pianti and Lamenti, attesting to the sorrows of a nation, increase in frequency until all voices from the people are hushed in the leaden sleep of Spanish despotism.[305] The Storie in like manner are more abundant between the years 1494 and 1530, when the wars of foreign invaders supplied the bards of the market-place with continual matter for improvisation. Among the earliest may be mentioned two poems on the Battle of Anghiari and the taking of Serezana.[306] Then the list proceeds with the tale of the Borgias, Guerre Orrende, Rotta di Ravenna, Mali deportamenti de Franciosi fato in Italia, and so forth, till it ends with La Presa di Roma and Rotta di Ferruccio. A last echo of these Storie and Lamenti—for alas! in Italy of the sixteenth century history and lamentation were all one—still sounds about the hillsides of Siena[307]:

O Piero Strozzi, 'ndù sono i tuoi bravoni? Al Poggio delle Donne in que' burroni. O Piero Strozzi, 'ndù sono i tuoi soldati? Al Poggio delle Donne in quei fossati. O Piero Strozzi, 'ndù son le tue genti? Al Poggio delle Donne a côr le lenti.

It may be well to say how these poems reached the people, before they were committed to writing or the press. There existed a professional class of rhymsters, usually blind men, if we may judge by the frequent affix of Cieco to their names, who tuned their guitar in the streets, and when a crowd had gathered round them, broke into some legend of romance, or told a tale of national misfortune. The Italian designation of these minstrels is Cantatore in Banca or Cantore di piazza. In the high tide of Florentine freedom the Cantore di piazza exercised a noble calling; for through his verse the voice of the common folk made itself heard beneath the very windows of the Signoria. In 1342, when the war with Pisa turned against the Florentines owing to the incompetence of their generals, Antonio Pucci, who was the most celebrated Cantatore of the day, took his lute and placed himself upon the steps beneath the Palazzo, and having invoked the Virgin Mary, struck up a Sermintese on the duty of making peace[308]:

Signor, pognàm ch'i' sia di vil nascenza, I' pur nacqui nel corpo di Firenza, Come qual c'è di più sofficienza: Onde 'l mi duole Di lei, considerando che esser suole Tenuta più che madre da figliuole; Oggi ogni bestia soggiogar la vuole E occupare.

Other poems of the same kind by Antonio Pucci belong to the year 1346, or celebrate the purchase of Lucca from Mastino della Scala, or the victory of Messer Piero Rosso at Padua, or the expulsion of the Duke of Athens from Florence in 1348. It must not be supposed that the Cantatori in Banca of the next century enjoyed so much liberty of censure or had so high a sense of their vocation as Antonio Pucci. Yet the people made their opinions freely heard in rhymes sung even by the children through the streets, as when they angered Martin V. in 1420 by crying beneath his very windows[309]:

Papa Martino, Signor di Piombino, Conte de Urbino, non vale un quattrino.

During the ascendency of Savonarola and the party-struggles of the Medici the rival cries of Palle and Viva Cristo Rè were turned into street songs[310]; but at last, after the siege and the victory of Clement, the voice of the people was finally stifled by authority.[311]

The element of satire in these ditties of the people leads me to speak of one very prominent poet of the fifteenth century—Domenico di Giovanni, called Il Burchiello, the rhyming barber.[312] He was born probably in 1403 at Florence, where his father, who was a Pisan, had acquired the rights of citizenship and followed the trade of a barber. Their shop was situated in Calimala, and formed a meeting-place for the wits, who carried Burchiello's verses over the town. The boy seems to have studied at Pisa, and acquired some slight knowledge of medicine.[313] At the age of four-and-twenty we find him married, with three children and no property.[314] Soon after this date, he separated from his wife; or else she left him on account of his irregular and dissolute habits. Peering through the obscurity of his somewhat sordid history, we see him getting into trouble with the Inquisition on account of profane speech, and then espousing the cause of the Albizzi against the Medicean faction. On the return of Cosimo de' Medici in 1434, Burchiello was obliged to leave Florence. He settled at Siena, and opened a shop in the Corso di Camollia, hoping to attract the Florentines whose business brought them to that quarter. Here he nearly ruined his health by debauchery, and narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a certain Ser Rosello.[315] Leaving Siena about 1440, Burchiello spent the last years of his life in wandering through the cities of Italy. We hear of him at Venice entertained by one of the Alberti family, then at Naples, finally in Rome, where he died in 1448, poisoned probably by Robert, a bastard of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, at the instigation of his ancient enemy, Cosimo de' Medici.[316] Such long arms and such retentive memory had the merchant despot.

Burchiello's sonnets were collected some thirty years after his death and published simultaneously at various places.[317] They owed their popularity partly to their political subject-matter, but more to their strange humor. A foreigner can scarcely understand their language, far less appreciate their fun; for not only are they composed in Florentine slang of the fifteenth century, but this slang itself consists of detached phrases and burlesque allusions, chipped as it were from current speech, broken into splinters, and then wrought into a grotesque mosaic. That Burchiello had the merit of originality, and that he caught the very note of plebeian utterance, is manifest from the numerous editions and imitations of his sonnets.[318] His Muse was a volgivaga Venus bred among the taverns and low haunts of vulgar company, whose biting wit introduced her to the society of the learned. Yet her utterances, at this distance of time, are so obscure and their point has been so blunted that to profess an admiration for Burchiello savors of literary affectation.[319] He was a poet of the transition; and the burlesque style which he made popular was destined to be superseded by the more refined and subtle Bernesque manner. Il Lasca, writing in the sixteenth century, expressed himself strongly against those who still ventured to compare Burchiello with the author of Le Pesche. "Let no one talk to me of Burchiello; to rank him with Berni is no better than to couple the fiend Charon with the Angel Gabriel."[320]

Not the least important branch of popular poetry in its bearing on the future of Italian literature was the strictly lyrical. In treating of these Volkslieder, it will be necessary to consider them under the two aspects of secular and religious—the former destined to supply Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici with models for their purest works of literary art, the latter containing the germs of the Florentine Sacred Play within the strophes of a hymn.

If we return to the golden days of the fourteenth century, we find that Dante's, Boccaccio's and Sacchetti's Ballate descended to the people and were easily adapted to their needs.[321] Minute comparison of Dante's dance-song of the Ghirlandetta with the version in use among the common folk will show what slight alterations were needed in order to render it the property of 'prentice lads and spinning maidens, and at the same time how subtle those changes were.[322] Dante's song might be likened to a florin fresh from the mint; the popular ditty to the same coin after it had circulated for a year or two, exchanging something of its sharp lines for the smoothness of currency and usage. The same is true of Boccaccio's Ballata, Il fior che 'l valor perde; except that here the transformation has gone deeper, and, if such a criticism may be hazarded, has bettered the original by rendering the sentiment more universal.[323] Sacchetti's charming song O vaghe montanine pasturelle underwent the same process of metamorphosis before it assumed the form in which it passed for a composition of Poliziano.[324] Starting with poems of this quality, the rhymsters of the market-place had noble models, and the use they made of them was adequate. We cannot from the wreck of time recover very many that were absolutely written for the people by the people; but we can judge of their quality by Angelo Poliziano's imitations.[325] He borrowed so largely from all sources, and his debts can be so accurately traced in his rispetti, that it is fair to credit the popular Muse with even such delicate work as La Brunettina, while the disputed authorship of the May-song Ben venga Maggio and of the Ballata Vaghe le montanine e pastorelle is sufficient to prove at least their widespread fame.[326] Whoever wrote them, they became the heirlooms of the people. If proof were needed of the vast number of such compositions in the fifteenth century—erotic, humorous, and not unfrequently obscene—it might be derived from the rubrics of the Laude or hymns, which were almost invariably parodies of popular dance-songs and intended to be sung to the same tunes.[327] Every festivity—May-morning tournaments, summer evening dances on the squares of Florence, weddings, carnival processions, and vintage-banquets at the villa—had their own lyrics, accompanied with music and the Carola.

The dance-songs and canzonets, of which we have been speaking, were chiefly of town growth and Tuscan. Another kind of popular love-poem, common to all the dialects of Italy, may be regarded as a special production of the country. Much has lately been written concerning these Rispetti, Strambotti and Stornelli.[328] Ample collections have been made to illustrate their local peculiarities. Their points of resemblance and dissimilarity have been subjected to critical analysis, and great ingenuity has been expended on the problem of their origin. It will be well to preface what has to be said about them with some explanation of terms. There are, to begin with, two distinct species. The Stornello Ritornello or Fiore, called also Ciure in Sicily, properly consists of two or three verses starting with the name of a flower. Thus[329]:

Fior di Granato! Bella, lo nome tuo sta scritto in cielo, Lo mio sta scritto sull'onda del mare.

Rispetto and Strambotto are two names for the same kind of song, which in the north-eastern provinces is also called Villotta and in Sicily Canzune.[330] Strictly speaking, the term Strambotto should be confined to literary imitations of the popular Rispetto. In Tuscany the lyric in question consists, in its normal form, of four alternately rhyming hendecasyllabic lines, followed by what is technically called the ripresa, or repetition, which may be composed of two, four, or even more verses. Though not strictly an octave stanza, it sometimes falls into this shape, and has then two pairs of three alternate rhymes, finished up with a couplet. In the following instance the quatrain and the ripresa are well marked[331]:

Quando sarà quel benedetto giorno, Che le tue scale salirò pian piano? I tuoi fratelli mi verranno intorno, Ad un ad un gli toccherò la mano. Quando sarà quel dì, cara colonna, Che la tua mamma chiamerò madonna? Quando sarà quel dì, caro amor mio? Io sarò vostra, e voi sarete mio!

In Sicily the Canzune exhibits a stanza of eight lines rhyming alternately throughout upon two sounds. Certain peculiarities, however, in the structure of the strophe render it probable that it was originally a quatrain followed by a ripresa of the same length. Thus[332]:

Quannu nascisti tu, stidda lucenti, 'N terra calaru tri ancili santi; Vinniru li Tri Re d'Orienti, Purtannu cosi d'oru e di brillanti; Tri aculi vularu prestamenti, Dannu la nova a punenti e a livanti; Bella, li to' billizzi su' putenti! Avi nov'anni chi ti sugnu amanti.

In the north-east the Villotta consists of a simple quatrain. Of this form the following is an example[333]:

Quanti ghe n'è, che me sente a cantare, E i dise;—Custia canta dal bon tempo.— Che prego 'l ciel che me possa agiutare; Quando che canto, alora me lamento.

Though these are the leading types of the Rispetto, Canzune and Villotta, each district exhibits a variety of subordinate and complex forms. The same may be said about the Stornello, Ritornello and Ciure. The names, too, are very variously applied; nor without pedantry would it be possible to maintain perfect precision in their usage.[334] It is enough to have indicated the two broad classes into which popular poetry of this kind is divided. For the future I shall refer to the one sort as Rispetti, to the other as Stornelli.

Comparative analysis makes it clear that the Rispetti and Stornelli scattered over all the provinces of Italy, constitute a common fund. That is to say, we do not meet with the Rispetti of each dialect confined to their own region; but the same original Rispetto, perhaps now lost to sight, has been adapted and transformed to suit the taste and idiom of the several provinces. To reconstitute the primitive type, to decide with certainty in each case the true source of these lyrics, is probably impossible. All we know for certain is that beneath apparent dialectical divergences the vulgar poetry of the Italians presents unmistakable signs of identity.[335] Which province was the primitive home of the Rispetti; whether Sicily, where the faculty for reproducing them is still most vivid[336]; or Tuscany, where they certainly attain their purest form and highest beauty; or whether all Italian country districts have contributed their quota to the general stock; are difficult questions, as yet by no means satisfactorily decided. Professor d'Ancona advances a theory, which is too plausible to be ignored in silence. Rispetti, he suggests, were first produced in Sicily, whence they traveled through Central Italy, receiving dialectical transmutation in Tuscany, and there also attaining to the perfection of their structure.[337] Numerous slight indications lead to the conclusion that their original linguistic type was southern. The imagery also which is common in verses sung to this day by the peasants of the Pistoja highlands, including frequent references to the sea with metaphors borrowed from orange-trees and palms, seems to indicate a Sicilian birthplace.[338] We have, moreover, the early evidence of six Napolitane copied from a Magliabecchian MS. of the fourteenth century, which exhibit the transition from southern to Tuscan idiom and structure.[339] One of these still exists in several dialects, under the title of La Rondinella importuna.[340] It is therefore certain that many Rispetti are very ancient, dating from the Suabian period, when Sicilian poetry, as we have seen, underwent the process of toscaneggiamento. However, D'Ancona's theory is too hypothetical, and it may also be said, too neat, to be accepted without reservation.

One point, at any rate, may be considered certain. Though the Rispetti are still alive upon the lips of contadini; though we may hear them echoing from farm and field through all the length and breadth of Italy; though the voluminous collections we possess have recently been gathered from viva voce recitation; yet they are perhaps as ancient as the dialects. The proof of this antiquity lies in the fact that whether we take the literary Strambotti of Poliziano for our standard, or the pasticci, incatenature and intrecciature of the sixteenth century for guides, we find the phrases and the style that are familiar to us in the rural lyrics of to-day.[341] Bronzino's Serenata and the Incatenatura of Bianchino contain, embedded in their structure, ditties which were universally known in the sixteenth century, and which are being sung still with unimportant alterations by the people. The attention of learned men was directed in the renascence of Tuscan literature to the beauty of these lyrics. Poliziano, writing to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1488, and describing his journey with Pietro through Montepulciano and Acquapendente in the month of May, says that he and his companions amused themselves with rappresaglie or adaptations of the songs they heard upon the way.[342] His road took him through what is still one of the best sources of local verse and music; and we may believe that at the close of the fifteenth century, the contadini of that district were singing nearly the same words as now. Nor, when we examine the points of similarity and difference in the Italian Rispetti and Stornelli, as they now exist, is there anything improbable in this antiquity. Nothing but great age can account for their adaptation to the tone, feeling, fancy, habits and language of so many regions. It must have taken more than a century or two to rub down their original angles, to efface the specific stamp of their birthplace, and to make them pass for home productions in Venice no less than Palermo, in Tuscan Montalcino and Ligurian Chiavari.

The retentiveness of the popular memory, before it has been spoiled by education, is quite sufficient to account for the preservation of these lyrics through several hundred years. Nor need their wide diffusion suggest difficulties. Italy in the middle ages offered readier means of intercommunication between the inhabitants of her provinces than she has done since the settlement of the country in 1530. When the liberation of the Communes gave a new impulse to intellectual and commercial activity, there began a steady and continually increasing movement from one city to another. Commercial enterprise led the burghers of Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Venice, Genoa, to establish themselves as bankers and middle-men, brokers and manufacturers, in Rome and Naples. Soldiers of adventure flocked from the south, and made the northern towns their temporary home. The sanctuaries of Gargano, Loretto and Assisi drew pilgrims from all quarters. Noblemen of Romagna acted as podestà beyond the Apennines, while Lombards opened shops in Palermo. Churchmen bred upon the Riviera wore the miter in the March; natives of the Spoletano taught in the schools of Bologna and Pavia. Men of letters, humanists and artists had no fixed dwelling-place, but wandered, like mercenary soldiers, from town to town in search of better pay. Students roamed from school to school according as the fame of great professors drew them. Party-quarrels in the commonwealths drove whole families, such as the Florentine Uberti, Alberti, Albizzi, Strozzi, into exile. Conquered cities, like Pisa, sent forth their burghers by hundreds as emigrants, too proud to bear the yoke of foes they had resisted. Nor were the Courts of princes without their influence in mingling the natives of different districts. Whether, then, we study the Novelle, or the histories of great houses, or the biographies of eminent Italians, or the records of the universities, we shall be led to the conclusion that from the year 1200 to the year 1550 there was a perpetual and lively intercourse by land and sea between the departments of Italy. This reciprocity of influence did not cease until the two despotic races, Austrian and Spaniard, threw each separate province into solitary chains. Such being the conditions of social exchange at the epoch when the language was in process of formation, there is nothing strange in finding the rural poetry of the south acclimatized in central and northern Italy. But the very facility of communication and the probable antiquity of these lyrics should make us cautious in adopting any rigid hypothesis about their origin. It is reasonable to suppose that such transferable property as love-poems might have been everywhere produced and rapidly diffused, the best from each center surviving by a natural process of selection. Lastly, whatever view may be taken of their formation and their age, we have every reason to believe that the fifteenth century was a fruitful period of production and accumulation. Toward the close of the quattrocento they attracted the curiosity of lettered poets, who began to imitate them, and in the next hundred years they were committed in large numbers to the press.[343]

In addition to the influence exercised by these popular lyrics over polite literature in the golden age of the Renaissance, extraordinary interest attaches to them as an indigenous species of verse, dating from remote antiquity and still surviving in all corners of the country. In them we analyze the Italian poetic genius at its source and under its most genuine conditions. Both from their qualities and their defects inferences may be drawn, which find application and illustration in the solemn works of laureled singers. The one theme of Rispetti and Stornelli is love; but love in all its phases and with all its retinue of associated emotions—expectation, fruition, disappointment, jealousy, despair, rejection, treachery, desertion, pleading, scorn—the joys of presence, the pangs of absence, the ecstasy of union, the agony of parting—love, natural and unaffected, turbulent or placid, chaste or troubled with desire, imperious or humble, tempestuously passionate or toned to tranquil acquiescence—love varying through all moods and tempers, yet never losing its note of spontaneity, sincerity and truth. The instincts of the people are pure, and their utterances of affection are singularly free from grossness. This at least is almost universally the case with lyrics gathered from the country. Approaching town-life, they lose their delicacy; and the products of the city are not unfrequently distinguished by the crudest obscenity.[344] The literary form of many of these masterpieces exhibits the beauty of rhythm, the refinement of outline, which we associate with melodies of the best Italian period—with chants of Pergolese, songs of Salvator Rosa. When we compare their subject-matter with that of our Northern Ballads, we notice a marked deficiency of legend, superstition or grotesque fancy. There are no witches, dragons, demon-lovers, no enchanted forests, no mythical heroes, no noble personages, few ghosts, few dreams and visions, in these songs poured forth among the olive-trees and myrtle-groves of Italy. Human nature, conscious of pleasure and of pain, finding its primitive emotion an adequate motive for verse subtly modulated through a thousand keys, is here sufficient to itself. The echoes imported from an outer world of passion and romance and action into this charmed region of the lover's heart are rare and feeble. Through all their national vicissitudes, the Italian peasants followed one sole aim in verse. The Rispetti of all times, localities and dialects form one protracted, ever-varying Duo between Thou and I, the dama and the damo, the eternal protagonists in the play of youth and love.

This absence of legendary and historical material marks a main difference between Italian and Teutonic inspiration. Among the Italic communities the practical historic sense was early developed, and sustained by the tradition of a classic past. It demanded a positive rather than imaginative treatment of contemporary fact and mythus. Among the people this requirement was satisfied by Storie, Lamenti, and prose Chronicles. Very few, indeed, are the relics of either romantic or actual history surviving in the lyrics of the rural population. Only here and there, in dim allusions to the Sicilian Vespers and the Norman Conquest, in the tale of the Baronessa di Carini, or in the Northern legend of Rosmunda, under its popular form of La Donna Lombarda, do we find a faint analogy between the Italian and Teutonic ballads.[345] Dramatic, mythical and epical elements are almost wholly wanting in the genuine lyrics of the people.

This statement requires some qualification. The four volumes of Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti recently published by Signor Pitrè, prove that the Sicilians in prose at least have a copious literature corresponding to German Märchen and Norse tales.[346] This literature, however, has not received poetic treatment in any existing southern songs that have been published, excepting in the few already noticed. At the same time, it must be mentioned that the collections of lyrics in north-western dialects—especially the Canti Monferrini, Canzoni Comasche, and Canti Leccesi—exhibit specimens of genuine ballads. It would seem that contact with French and German borderers along the Alpine rampart had introduced into Piedmont and Lombardy a form of lyric which is not essentially Italian. Had I space sufficient at disposal, I should like to quote the Donna Lombarda, Moglie Infedele, Giuseppina Parricida, Principessa Giovanna, Giuliano della Croce Bianca, Cecilia, Rè Carlino, Morando, and several others from Ferraro's collection.[347] They illustrate, what is exceedingly rare in popular Italian poetry, both the subject-matter and the manner peculiar to the Northern Ballad. Let the following verses from La Sposa per Forza suffice[348]:

Ra soi madona a r'ha brassaja Suvra u so coffu a r'ha minèe; Uardèe qui, ra me noiretta, Le bele gioje che vi vôi dunèe. Mi n'ho csa fè dle vostre gioje; E manc ancur dla vostra cà; Cma ca voja dir bel gioje Ra me mama m' na mandirà.

To comparative mythologists in general, and to English students in particular, the most interesting of these rare Italian Ballads is undoubtedly one known as L'Avvelenato.[349] So far as I am aware, it is unique in the Italian language; nor had its correspondences with Northern Ballad-literature been noticed until I pointed them out in 1879.[350] In his work on popular Italian poetry, Professor D'Ancona included the following song, which he had heard upon the lips of a young peasant of the Pisan district[351]:

Dov'eri 'ersera a cena Caro mio figlio, savio e gentil? Mi fai morire Ohimè! Dov'eri 'ersera a cena Gentile mio cavalier?— Ero dalla mia dama; Mio core stà male, Che male mi stà! Ero dalla mia dama; 'L mio core che se ne và.— Che ti diènno da cena, Caro mio figlio, savio e gentil? Mi fai morire, Ohimè! Che ti diènno da cena, Gentile mio cavalier?— Un anguilletta arrosto, Cara mia madre; Mio core stà male, Che male mi stà! Un anguilletta arrosto, 'L mio core che se ne và.

Other versions of the same poem occur in the dialects of Venice, Como and Lecco with such variations as prove them all to be the offshoots from some original now lost in great antiquity. That it existed and was famous so far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, is proved by an allusion in the Cicalata in lode della Padella e della Frittura, recited before the Accademia della Crusca by Lorenzo Panciatichi in 1656.[352] A few lines are also quoted in the incatenatura of the Cieco Fiorentino, published at Verona in 1629.[353] Any one who is familiar with our Border Minstrelsy will perceive at once that this is only an Italian version of the Ballad of Lord Donald or Lord Randal.[354] The identity between the two is rendered still more striking by an analysis of the several Lombard versions. In that of Como, for example, the young man makes his will; and this is the last verse[355]:

Cossa lassè alla vostra dama, Figliuol mio caro, fiorito e gentil, Cossa lassè alla vostra dama? La fôrca da impiccarla, Signora mama, mio cor sta mal! La fôrca da impiccarla: Ohimè, ch'io moro, ohimè!

The same version furnishes the episode of the poisoned hounds[356]:

Coss'avì fâ dell'altra mezza, Figliuol mio caro, fiorito e gentil? Cossa avì fâ dell'altra mezza? L'hô dada alla cagnòla: Signôra mama, mio core sta mal! L'hô dada alla cagnòla: Ohimè, ch'io moro, ohimè! Cossa avì fâ della cagnòla, Figliuol mio caro, fiorito e gentil? Cossa avì fâ della cagnòla? L'è morta drê la strada; Signôra mama, mio core sta mal! L'è morta drê la strada: Ohimè, ch'io moro, ohimè!

It is worth mentioning that the same Ballad belongs under slightly different forms to the Germans, Swedes, and other nations of the Teutonic stock; but so far as I have yet been able to discover, it remains the sole instance of that species of popular literature in Italy.[357] The phenomenon is singular, and though conjectures may be hazarded in explanation, it is impossible, until further researches for parallel examples have been made, to advance a theory of how this Ballad penetrated so far south as Tuscany.