Signor Tigri’s collection,[22] to which I shall confine my attention in this paper, consists of eleven hundred and eighty-five rispetti, with the addition of four hundred and sixty-one stornelli.  Rispetto, it may be said in passing, is the name commonly given throughout Italy to short poems, varying from six to twelve lines, constructed on the principle of the octave stanza.  That is to say, the first part of the rispetto consists of four or six lines with alternate rhymes, while one or more couplets, called the ripresa, complete the poem.[23] The stornello, or ritournelle, never exceeds three lines, and owes its name to the return which it makes at the end of the last line to the rhyme given by the emphatic word of the first.  Browning, in his poem of ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’ has accustomed English ears to one common species of the stornello,[24] which sets out with the name of a flower, and rhymes with it, as thus: 

    Fior di narciso. 
  Prigionero d’amore mi son reso,
  Nel rimirare il tuo leggiadro viso.

The divisions of those two sorts of songs, to which Tigri gives names like The Beauty of Women, The Beauty of Men, Falling in Love, Serenades, Happy Love, Unhappy Love, Parting, Absence, Letters, Return to Home, Anger and Jealousy, Promises, Entreaties and Reproaches, Indifference, Treachery and Abandonment, prove with what fulness the various phases of the tender passion are treated.  Through the whole fifteen hundred the one theme of Love is never relinquished.  Only two persons, ‘I’ and ‘thou,’ appear upon the scene; yet so fresh and so various are the moods of feeling, that one can read them from first to last without too much satiety.

To seek for the authors of these ditties would be useless.  Some of them may be as old as the fourteenth century; others may have been made yesterday.  Some are the native product of the Tuscan mountain villages, especially of the regions round Pistoja and Siena, where on the spurs of the Apennines the purest Italian is vernacular.  Some, again, are importations from other provinces, especially from Sicily and Naples, caught up by the peasants of Tuscany and adapted to their taste and style; for nothing travels faster than a Volkslied.  Born some morning in a noisy street of Naples, or on the solitary slopes of Radicofani, before the week is out, a hundred voices are repeating it.  Waggoners and pedlars carry it across the hills to distant towns.  It floats with the fishermen from bay to bay, and marches with the conscript to his barrack in a far-off province.  Who was the first to give it shape and form?  No one asks, and no one cares.  A student well acquainted with the habits of the people in these matters says, ’If they knew the author of a ditty, they would not learn it, far less if they discovered that it was a scholar’s.’  If the cadence takes their ear, they consecrate the song at once by placing it upon the honoured list of ‘ancient