[Footnote 21:  This sentence requires some qualification.  In his Poesia Popolare Italiana, 1878, Professor d’Ancona prints a Pisan, a Venetian, and two Lombard versions of our Border ballad ‘Where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son,’ so close in general type and minor details to the English, German, Swedish, and Finnish versions of this Volkslied as to suggest a very ancient community of origin.  It remains as yet, however, an isolated fact in the history of Italian popular poetry.]

     [Footnote 22:  Canti Popolari Toscani, raccolti e annotati
     da Giuseppe Tigri.  Volume unico.  Firenze:  G. Barbera, 1869.]

[Footnote 23:  This is a description of the Tuscan rispetto.  In Sicily the stanza generally consists of eight lines rhyming alternately throughout, while in the North of Italy it is normally a simple quatrain.  The same poetical material assumes in Northern, Central, and Southern Italy these diverge but associated forms.]

[Footnote 24:  This song, called Ciure (Sicilian for fiore) in Sicily, is said by Signor Pitre to be in disrepute there.  He once asked an old dame of Palermo to repeat him some of these ditties.  Her answer was, ’You must get them from light women; I do not know any.  They sing them in bad houses and prisons, where, God be praised, I have never been.’  In Tuscany there does not appear to be so marked a distinction between the flower song and the rispetto.]

[Footnote 25:  Much light has lately been thrown on the popular poetry of Italy; and it appears that contemporary improvisatori trust more to their richly stocked memories and to their power of recombination than to original or novel inspiration.  It is in Sicily that the vein of truly creative lyric utterance is said to flow most freely and most copiously at the present time.]

     [Footnote 26:  ’Remember me, fair one, to the scrivener.  I do
     not know him or who he is, but he seems to me a sovereign
     poet, so cunning is he in his use of verse.’]

[Footnote 27:  It must be remarked that Tigri draws a strong contrast in this respect between the songs of the mountain districts which he has printed and those of the towns, and that Pitre, in his edition of Sicilian Volkslieder, expressly alludes to the coarseness of a whole class which he had omitted.  The MSS. of Sicilian and Tuscan songs, dating from the fifteenth century and earlier, yield a fair proportion of decidedly obscene compositions.  Yet the fact stated above is integrally correct.  When acclimatised in the large towns, the rustic Muse not unfrequently assumes a garb of grossness.  At home, among the fields and on the mountains, she remains chaste and romantic.]

     [Footnote 28:  In a rispetto, of which I subjoin a
     translation, sung by a poor lad to a mistress of higher
     rank, love itself is pleaded as the sign of a gentle soul:—­