such as still delight the Trasteverini in the popular drama of “Meo Patacca.” He had learned to read from one of his fellow shepherds, who in his younger days had attended a school specially founded for boys of his station. The education thus received was liberally bestowed by him in turn on his companions. Every evening at sunset, surrounded by a group of boys, this excellent man held a reading school. Never was the task of teaching more generously undertaken; never did scholars apply with more ardour to learn. Nor was this the only school. At the same hour the fathers of families gathered their little ones around them, and with touching and tender solicitude spent hours in teaching them to pray and to recite the catechism. What a picture! the sunset spreading over sky and prairie-like pasture
Hues that have words, and speak to you of heaven,
and bathing in light the poor huts with their rustic groups; the young busied in learning to read, the old bending lovingly over their little ones, whose infant lips lisped after them a prayer to their Father above!
Among the children thus trained I noticed one chubby, large-headed fellow, whose very history was a practical commentary on the moral teaching imparted. He had been left an orphan some years before, but had found a father and a mother in every household in the community. He was at home with all, and although he was attached to one family in a particular manner, he was nevertheless equally the favourite of the rest. If the bread of strangers can ever be eaten without that bitterness which the great Italian poet has ascribed to it, surely love had sweetened its salt for the shepherd orphan-boy.
Their notions of geography were very limited indeed. Of course, being Neapolitans, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, or, as they styled it, “the Kingdom,” was in their minds the central point of the system of the universe. The doctrine concerning the countries of the earth that seemed to prevail held, that the entire world is a reproduction on a grand scale of the pasture lands in which they themselves lived. The world was but a more extensive Campagna, the different countries were but larger farms, belonging to a proprietor who wore a crown, and was called Emperor or King.
As one farm bordered another, so did one realm touch its neighbour, like so many pieces of variegated cloth in a patchwork quilt. Nor were they by any means clear in their views as to the order in which the various countries came. This one thing, however, they knew full well, that in all the world there was nothing to equal Rome.
It would be an unprofitable task to endeavour to trace in the shepherds of Virgil’s Eclogues the types of those shepherds whom I have been describing. Fearful of giving offence to the fastidious, the rules of art vigorously exclude from pastoral poetry many details which occur every day in pastoral life. But even when allowance is made for the enormous difference between the ideal and the real, in every case, the Italian pastoral life as described by the great Roman poet is marvellously unlike what we find near Rome in our own day.
With regard to it, the whole cast of imagery which he employs is completely out of place. No modern shepherd would dream of doing the things his predecessors did, or of using the language they used. Who, in a spot where a tree is hardly to be seen, would speak of Tityrus as reclining under the shade of a spreading beech? Which of them would plant pear-trees and vines where all vegetatation droops? And it is quite impossible that any one of them could think of seeking the cool shade by the side of the sacred fountains, in the hope of being lulled to sleep by the buzzing of Hyblœan bees. But if we turn from the verses where the smooth speeches of Melibœus and the railleries of Menalcas are embalmed, we shall find striking points of resemblance between our modern nomads and the nomad shepherds of Africa described in the third Georgic, 339—345.
Why should my muse enlarge on Libyan swains,
Their scatter’d cottages, and ample plains,
Where oft the flocks without a leader stray,
Or through continued deserts take their way,
And, feeding, add the length of night to day?
Whole months they wander, grazing as they go;
Nor folds nor hospitable harbour know;
Such an extent of plains, so vast a space
Of wilds unknown, and of untasted grass,
Allures their eyes: the shepherd last appears,
And with him all his patrimony bears,
His house, and household gods, his trade of war,
His bow and quiver, and his trusty cur.—Dryden.
Well is it for humanity that instead of bow and quiver and the trade of war, the men of our time bear with them the tenderness of home ties, the culture of education, and the law of charity.
A NIGHT OF TERROR.
I am naturally of a timid disposition,—in fact, I may say of a very timid disposition,—and am subject to what, in speaking of a large mass of people, we should call panics.
I was for a long time horribly frightened by the idea of French invasion, and kept my portmanteau in constant readiness for a sudden “stampede” into the interior of the kingdom on the receipt of the first intelligence of the arrival of the enemy on our shores. This feeling gradually subsided, and I then was tormented with a dread of fire; I couldn’t see a ladder fire-escape leaning against the railings of the parish church, without a relapse, and wondering when my time would come to make a terrific descent in my night-cap and slippers in one from the fourth floor of my lodgings; then the fear would come over me that perhaps the fire-escape might not arrive in time, and that at the last moment I should be left to my own resources for escape. I therefore arranged everything in my own mind in case of such a catastrophe. I intended to tear the sheets into three pieces, knot each piece firmly together, draw the bedstead to the window, fasten the end to the bed-post, and so descend hand over hand; but not feeling quite certain if my presence of mind would be sufficient to procure in time my “absence of body,” I engaged the boy belonging to the house, for a trifling remuneration, to ring
