These friendly minstrels, whom I told that I would translate their songs into my native tongue, and that I would not forget them and the hours I had spent with them, entreated me to stay yet this other evening in Calvi, and they would spend the whole night in singing to me; but if I was resolved on leaving, then I must go to Zilia, which, they said, had the best singers in Corsica. "Ah!" said the shoemaker, "the best of them all is dead. He sang as mellow as any bird, but he went to the hills and became a bandit, and the country-people protected him long from the officers, because he sang so beautifully; but they caught him at last, and he lost his head in Corte." Thus Calvi became an oasis of song to me in these quiet, thinly-inhabited regions. I found it interesting, therefore, to remember that two of the best Corsican poets had been natives of Calvi—Giovanni Baptista Agnese, a writer of religious poetry born in the year 1611, and Vincenzo Giubega, who died in the year 1800, at the age of thirty-nine, as judge in Ajaccio. Giubega is not unjustly termed the Anacreon of Corsica. I have read some beautiful love-poems and sonnets of his, characterized by much grace and feeling. Few of his songs survive; he burned most of them before his death. As Sophocles says that memory is the queen of things, and because the muse of poetry herself is a daughter of Mnemosyne, I shall mention here another once world-renowned Corsican of Calvi—Giulio Giudi, in the year 1581 the wonder of Padua on account of his unfortunate memory. He could repeat 36,000 names after once hearing them. People called him _Giudi della gran memoria_. But he produced nothing; his memory had killed all his creative faculty. Pico von Mirandola, who lived before him, produced, but he died young. It is with the precious gift of memory as with all other gifts—they are a curse of the gods, when they give too much. I have already mentioned the name of Salvatore Viale. This author, a native of Bastia, is the most productive poet the island can yet boast of. One of his works is a comic poem called _La Dinomachia_, in the vein of the _Secchia Rapita_ of Tassoni; and he has translated Anacreon, and part of Byron. Byron in Corsica, therefore!—Viale has earned the gratitude of his country by an unwearied scientific activity, and his illustrations of the manners and customs of the Corsicans are highly meritorious. Corsica has also a translator of Horace—Giuseppe Ottaviano Savelli, a friend of Alfieri, of whom I have already spoken. I could name many more Corsican poets, as, for example, Biadelli of Bastia, who died in the year 1822, a writer of songs. But their poems will never attain more than a Corsican celebrity. The most beautiful poetry of Corsica is her popular poetry, and Grief is the greatest Corsican poet. CHAPTER VII. THE CORSICAN DIRGES.