There could hardly be a more violent contrast than between the folk-music of the two Latin countries, France and Italy. The Italians are famous for their violent emotions, and these are revealed in their folk-songs, puffing like a steam engine. The utmost of passionate expression, by any means at hand--this seems to be the ideal of a goodly portion of the songs. Where the French songs are reserved the Italian are frenzied; where the French are delicate the Italian are like a sledge-hammer; where the French use a needle the Italian use an ax. This statement must be made with some exceptions, notably the songs of Venice and certain other northern localities. The Venetian songs are reserved and chiselled. Many of them might have been written by Mozart. They never go to excess of emotion. They are often as formally perfect as the French. The song known as ‘The Fisher’ (which has practically become a folk-song in Germany) may be taken as a fair example of this graceful and discreet type of lyric. As we go farther south the heat and sensuousness of the land show more and more in the music: Naples has a type of folk-song all her own. It sometimes shows the grace of the Venetian song, but never its reserve. The lighter songs all have an ardor of their own, for the Southern Italian is never abstract. But their lightness carries with it a certain fickleness, as though the lover expected to serenade at least a dozen fair ladies before the night was done. _La Vera Sorrentina_ is one of the best of this type. The Neapolitan are perhaps the best known of all the Italian songs, and there are thousands of them that have been published. A large proportion of these are not strictly folk-songs, having been written by conscious composers (who, however, were of the people and composed for the people). For it seems that the folk-genius of the Italians was almost dormant in music for several centuries. But these semi-folk-songs are among the best. The more modern ones nearly always betray a certain vulgarity, a certain commonplaceness somewhere in their outline--a fault which is not often to be charged against the genuine folk-song. But one is willing to forgive them this, for the sake of the loveliness which is beneath it all. The strains of _Oh, sole mio_ have already gone round the world, and _Oh, Maria_ is scarcely inferior. And when the Italian Song (especially the Sicilian) breaks out in full passion it is not to be matched for crude emotional power the world over. Any one of these songs, as, for instance, the fine one known from its refrain as _O, Mama mia_, shows the inspiration of the bloody Italian operas of the ’nineties.