vy Chase,'
or 'Sir Patrick Spens,' or 'Gil Morrice,' in a poetry which is still
so vital with the life of past centuries, is all the more remarkable
because Italian history is distinguished above that of other nations
by tragic episodes peculiarly suited to poetic treatment. Many of
these received commemoration in the fourteenth century from Dante;
others were embodied in the _novelle_ of Boccaccio and Cinthio and
Bandello, whence they passed into the dramas of Shakspere, Webster,
Ford, and their contemporaries. But scarcely an echo can be traced
through all the volumes of the recently collected popular songs. We
must seek for an explanation of this fact partly in the conditions of
Italian life, and partly in the nature of the Italian imagination.
Nowhere in Italy do we observe that intimate connection between the
people at large and the great nobles which generates the sympathy of
clanship. Politics in most parts of the peninsula fell at a very
early period into the hands either of irresponsible princes, who ruled
like despots, or else of burghers, who administered the state within
the walls of their Palazzo Pubblico. The people remained passive
spectators of contemporary history. The loyalty of subjects to their
sovereign which animates the Spanish ballads, the loyalty of retainers
to their chief which gives life to the tragic ballads of the Border,
did not exist in Italy. Country-folk felt no interest in the doings of
Visconti or Medici or Malatesti sufficient to arouse the enthusiasm of
local bards or to call forth the celebration of their princely
tragedies in verse. Amid the miseries of foreign wars and home
oppression, it seemed better to demand from verse and song some
mitigation of the woes of life, some expression of personal emotion,
than to record the disasters which to us at a distance appear poetic
in their grandeur.

These conditions of popular life, although unfavourable to the
production of ballad poetry, would not, however, have been sufficient
by themselves to check its growth, if the Italians had been strongly
impelled to literature of this type by their nature. The real reason
why their _Volkslieder_ are amorous and personal is to be found in the
quality of their imagination. The Italian genius is not creatively
imaginative in the highest sense. The Italians have never, either in
the ancient or the modern age, produced a great drama or a national
epic, the 'AEneid' and the 'Divine Comedy' being obv