What between winters in Rome and summers in one or the other mountain-town, with intervals of absence now at Florence and now at Siena, Mr. Story has had such opportunities as fall to the lot of very few foreigners.  For, in studying the ways of a people, it is as with wild animals,—­you must be long enough among them to get them wonted, so that you may catch them at unawares.  His book is on the whole a delightful one, and would have been so without qualification, had he confined it to a relation of his own experiences.  Where he narrates or describes, he is always lively and interesting; where he disserts or grows learned, he gives up his vantage-ground, and must consent to be dull like everybody else.  Anybody can be learned, anybody except Dr. Holmes dull; but not everybody can be a poet and artist.  The chapter on the Evil Eye is a marvel of misplaced erudition.  The author has hunted all antiquity like a policeman, and arrested high and low on the least suspicion of a squint.  Horace and Jodocus Damhouder, (to whose harmless Dam our impatience tempts us to add an n,) Tibullus and Johannes Wouwerus, St. Augustine and Turnebus, with a motley mob of Jews, Christians, Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and Lord-knows-whats, are all thrust into the dock cheek by jowl.  For ourselves, we would have taken Mr. Story’s word for it, without the attestation of these long-winded old monsters, who wrote about charms and enchantments in a style as potent in disenchantment as holy-water, and who bored their own generation too thoroughly to have any claim upon the button of ours.  Every age is sure of its own fleas without poking over the rag-bag of the past; and of all things, a superstition has the least need of proving the antiquity of its pedigree, since its very etymology is better than the certificate of all the Heralds’ Colleges put together.  We are surprised that so clever and lively a man as Mr. Story, should not have seen that in such matters one live fact is better than fifty dead ones, and that even in history it is not so much the facts as what the historian has contrived to see in them that gives life to his work.

But learning makes a small part of Mr. Story’s book; only, as the concluding chapter happens to bristle with quotations and references, thickly as the nave of St. Peter’s on a festival with bayonets, this is the last taste left in the mouth.  The really valuable parts of the book (and they make much the larger part of it) are those in which the author relates his own experiences.  After so many volumes stuffed like a chiffonnier’s basket with the shreds of ancient Rome, it is really refreshing to come upon a book which makes us feel that Italy is still inhabited by very human beings, and contains something more than the tombs of the Scipios, and inscriptions interesting only to people who think a dead Roman donkey better than a living Italian lion.  The chapters on Street-Music in Rome, on Games, on Gaffes and Theatres, on Villeggiatura and the Vintage,