Much of the Italian folk-music is enlivened with the most powerful rhythm imaginable. The dance is cultivated in Italy as it is in scarcely any other country in the world. Many of the Spanish rhythms are to be found in the Italian songs, a relic of the times when the Spaniards held Sicily and the southern parts of the peninsula. We should not forget, either, the inimitable joke-songs of the Italians, the clear source of the _opera buffa_, which has been cultivated successfully by no other people. The love of the Italians for a joke has been noted from the earliest mediæval times. We need only listen to the Italian fruit-merchant trying to convince the ward politician that Columbus discovered Ireland to know that the _tempo allegro giocoso_ is as alive to-day in the southern Latins as it ever was. The innumerable joke songs of Italy present a peculiar problem to the singer. They must be sung with the most expert enunciation, with a fine technique that conceals all art, and with a spirit bursting with fun. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they are impossible to any but the Italian born and bred. Their purely musical value, it must be admitted, is usually slight; but they have none the less a high place in folk-song literature. It is only fair to say that the musicianship of the Italian songs is often careless and faulty. Especially is this likely to be true in the accompaniments, which are always of the simplest possible description and frequently become monotonous with their limited supply of chords in regular succession. Yet this fault is only one more mark of the Italian genius, to which the melody--that is, the voice part, the human part--is all-important.