(p. xix) that the Strambotto and the Stornello are the indigenous productions of Southern Italy. “The poetry of Southern Italy is generally lyrical, that of Northern Italy narrative.” The etymology of the word Strambotto has naturally suffered, equally with the samples of the kind of song, from the preference which attracts our author to a more purely national study, and I think that the authors whom I have followed in this matter (Folk-Songs of Italy, Prefatory Treatise, p. 18) have the best of the argument. The most interesting of the samples supplied have found a place in my collection.
Count Nigra has treated the narrative rhymes in an entirely different manner. Their nature, history, sources, variants, migrations, parallels, have all been made the subject of the most careful research and study. We are presented with 146 Canzoni, ranging from the earliest glimmer of tradition down to the days of Napoleon’s conscripts; collected in numbers from different localities in various dialects, painstakingly collated; rendered into Italian intelligible to all, and quite a little treatise on each, tracing its branch-variants up to a parent group-stem, and then following that stem through its multiform root-suckers in various countries—Provence, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia, England, and Scotland.
Only those who have in any degree pursued some attempts of the kind can have any idea of the exasperating labyrinths into which such researches must lead. Caring nothing for the tortuous and torturing divagations into which they are leading the student, light-hearted peasants have in the course of ages woven their tales, in rhyme as well as prose, into a kind of texture from which at our date it has become almost an impossible thing to draw the several threads. A song imported by an itinerant minstrel is certain to be caught up, and the heroic deeds it celebrates ascribed to the local favourite. This is bad enough, but what is tenfold more misleading, yet equally frequent, there results from this treatment, that a song maybe centuries
