This defect of anything corresponding to our ballads of ‘Chevy Chase,’ or ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ or ‘Gil Morrice,’ in a poetry which is still so vital with the life of past centuries, is all the more remarkable because Italian history is distinguished above that of other nations by tragic episodes peculiarly suited to poetic treatment.  Many of these received commemoration in the fourteenth century from Dante; others were embodied in the novelle of Boccaccio and Cinthio and Bandello, whence they passed into the dramas of Shakspere, Webster, Ford, and their contemporaries.  But scarcely an echo can be traced through all the volumes of the recently collected popular songs.  We must seek for an explanation of this fact partly in the conditions of Italian life, and partly in the nature of the Italian imagination.  Nowhere in Italy do we observe that intimate connection between the people at large and the great nobles which generates the sympathy of clanship.  Politics in most parts of the peninsula fell at a very early period into the hands either of irresponsible princes, who ruled like despots, or else of burghers, who administered the state within the walls of their Palazzo Pubblico.  The people remained passive spectators of contemporary history.  The loyalty of subjects to their sovereign which animates the Spanish ballads, the loyalty of retainers to their chief which gives life to the tragic ballads of the Border, did not exist in Italy.  Country-folk felt no interest in the doings of Visconti or Medici or Malatesti sufficient to arouse the enthusiasm of local bards or to call forth the celebration of their princely tragedies in verse.  Amid the miseries of foreign wars and home oppression, it seemed better to demand from verse and song some mitigation of the woes of life, some expression of personal emotion, than to record the disasters which to us at a distance appear poetic in their grandeur.

These conditions of popular life, although unfavourable to the production of ballad poetry, would not, however, have been sufficient by themselves to check its growth, if the Italians had been strongly impelled to literature of this type by their nature.  The real reason why their Volkslieder are amorous and personal is to be found in the quality of their imagination.  The Italian genius is not creatively imaginative in the highest sense.  The Italians have never, either in the ancient or the modern age, produced a great drama or a national epic, the ‘AEneid’ and the ‘Divine Comedy’ being obviously of different species from the ‘Iliad’ or the ‘Nibelungen Lied.’  Modern Italians, again, are distinguished from the French, the Germans, and the English in being the conscious inheritors of an older, august, and strictly classical civilisation.  The great memories of Rome weigh down their faculties of invention.  It would also seem as though they shrank in their poetry from the representation of what is tragic and spirit-stirring.  They incline