are adapted to an artificial cast of sentiment; they encourage exaggeration and tend to mannerism and commonplace. Singly they are charming, but "when taken collectively we become indifferent to their unity, felicity, and grace, and accuse them of what under other circumstances we might possibly commend, their recurring metaphors, their uniform structure, and the unfailing sweetness of their versification."[154] Yet in their complex form, a prolonged repetition of the same rhyme tends, like the return to a simple air amid difficult variations, touchingly to renew the feeling originally and pleasingly evoked; and thus is it that sonnets often possess a charm of which, in their ambitious attempts, their authors were probably quite unconscious.[155] [Footnote 154: British and Foreign Quarterly Review, xi. 376.] [Footnote 155: See above, Vol. II., cap. xxv.] It is not now our object to analyze the varied metrical arrangements to which the fertile language of Italy willingly lent itself, and which its minstrels, "A mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease," delighted to mingle and multiply. Enough, in addition to the polished sonnet, to name noble canzoni, sublime odes, and tender elegies. But the absence of ballad poetry, with its wide-circling echoes of long antecedent events and feelings, is remarkable, and has been imputed to an early addiction of the nation to prosaic habits of trade. This solution is, however, little satisfactory in itself, and is equally at variance with the genius and the language of the people. Perhaps it would be more just to assign a diametrically opposite cause, and to seek in their vivid imaginations, and in the exuberant facility of their melodious tongue, that universality of versification which tended to depreciate its quality, or, at all events, to diminish the estimation bestowed even on their most popular compositions. It is accordingly in nations among whom poetry is a rare gift, and whose idiom can embody it in terse and simple diction, that we find those lyrics which, possessing a traditional popularity, are at once the germ and index of national sentiment.[*156] We seek in vain for such among the recognised literature of Italy; and though the dulcet chants of the Venetian gondolier, and the monotonous lazzaroni ditties of Naples, may be deemed of that class, their infinite and ever-changing variety appears to divest them of the historic charm that attaches to the chivalric redondillas of Spain, and to the pensive minstrelsy of our fatherland. [Footnote *156: How could Italy have a ballad poetry full of national sentiment before she became a nation? Her living poetry then and for centuries before, as now, is the _Rispetto_. Cf., for the _Poesie Popolari_ generally, D'ANCONA, _La Poesia Popolare Italiana_ (Livorno, 1906); for the Marche especially GIANANDREA, _Canti Popolari Marchigiani_ (Torino, Loescher, 1875).] * * * * *