Most lovers of English poetry now possess the 'Oxford Book of English Verse.' A great many are fortunate enough to have also the 'Oxford Book of French Verse.' How many readers will be found, we wonder, for the 'Oxford Book of Italian Verse,' now chosen and edited by Mr St John Lucas ?

One hopes the answer will be, "A great many, and of the most intelligent kind"; for, indeed, the collection deserves such. But English people, though lovers of poetry, are not so commonly lovers of foreign languages. Most of

them have some conscientious knowledge of French, but comparatively few have more than a travelling acquaintance with Italian. They think it a beautiful language-a point on which all but the deaf must agree; but they usually prefer listening to it to reading it.

Perhaps a change for the better is beginning in this direction. During the last few years it has seemed to me that interest in Italian poetry is growing and spreading in England. The Dante societies are numerous, and if people care to read Dante they will

probably care to read other poets, his compatriots. We have heard it asserted lately that the Dante societies are content to read their poet in translations. It is a dark accusation, and one should not be too ready to believe the worst. I certainly know three Dante societies of which the members are diligent students of Italian. As one of them remarked, translations were so difficult it was simpler to learn the language. I suspect that this member had been struggling with Cary; but it would be easy to give the remark a wider application.

The new "Oxford Book' should prove & great encouragement to those sensible people who think it natural to learn a language. Here they will find five hundred pages of Italian poems ranging from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, long and short, religious and profane, sweet and sensitive, grave and gay.

The Anthology begins fitly with St Francis of Assisi's well-known Psalm of Praise, that noble and childlike thanksgiving for all the fair Creation of God

There is nothing like the "Laudes Creaturarum" in the rest of the book; but that perhaps is saying no more than that there was never another St Francis of Assisi.

The poem by Ciullo d'Alcamo which follows it is one of the kind called a Contrasto, a dialogue between an ardent and very plain-spoken lover and a lady of the too-muchprotesting order. It is no doubt given by Mr Lucas because of its interest, being, as was once supposed, the oldest piece of Italian poetry extant. There is only half of it before us here, with no intimation of the existence of the other half. A few notes might have been mercifully granted, as it is quite the most difficult piece of Italian in the book, with words of Sicilian and Provençal origin, such as abento, perperi, and aritonno. What would the average reader make of this verse?

"Se i tuoi parenti trovanmi
E che mi pozon fari?
Una difesa mettoci
Di dumilia agostari ;
Non mi tocarà patreto
Per quanto avere ha' in Bari.
Viva lo 'mperadore, graz' a Deo !
Intendi, bella, questo ti dico eo."

Could he be expected to know that certain coins called "Augustals" were struck in the year 1231, and that in the same year the Emperor Frederick II. instituted the system of the Defensa, which provided that an inferior unjustly attacked by a superior allowed to invoke the ereign's name, and this called a Defensa?

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We would refer the inquiring reader, who is perhaps not exactly the same person as the average reader, to 'The Forerunners of Dante,' a perfect little book by that perfect scholar, Mr A. J. Butler, the loss of whom we still deplore. His editing of the early Italian poets is an example of what such a thing should be, for it combines the knowledge of the expert with the fine taste and sympathy of the born man of letters. The editing of Mr Lucas leaves something to be desired. It may be that he is a little deficient in the love of perfection; it may be that he does not interest himself in the complicated and scientific versification of Dante's forerunners and contemporaries. But for whatever reason, it is a pity that he should have given a faulty version of the most beautiful thing written before the 'Vita Nuova,' and not even by that surpassed.

The lovely elegy of Giacomino Pugliese (No. 8),

"Morte, perchè m' hai fatto sì gran guerra,"

is one of the wonders of literature. Comment is helpless; it is too exquisitely simple and sweet. One might as well comment on the lament of the nightingale.

One other poem of the same period, though not equal, may be compared with it-Rinaldo d'Aquino's song of the forsaken girl whose lover has "taken the Cross" for his own salvation and to her very pitiful loss. It is a song of sorrow, naïve and pathetic.

"Gia mai non mi conforto,

Nè mi vo' rallegrare:
Le nave sono al porto,
E vogliono collare.
Vassene la più gente

In terra d'oltra mare:
Ed io, lassa dolente,
Como deg' io fare?

La croce salva la gente,
E me face disviare :
La croce mi fa dolente,

Non mi val Dio pregare.
Oi croce pellegrina,

Perchè m' hai si distrutta? Oi me, lassa Tapina

Ch'i' ardo e 'ncendo tutta!"

Never can I forget my woe,

And comfort naught avails. The ships are in the port below, Waiting to hoist their sails. The men are all for sailing

To lands beyond the sea: And I alone am wailing

What will become of me?

The cross that saves all living

Has set my steps astray:
The cross such grief is giving,

To God I cannot pray.
Oh, cross of pilgrims faring,

What of my lonely strife!
The grief my heart is bearing

Will waste away my life.

Many such a song went sighing down the wind that filled the sails of Crusaders' ships.

We do not often hear the maiden's own voice in these early poems. But it sounds again clearly in the two sonnets (Nos. 16 and 17) in which a gentle girl refuses to rejoice with the rejoicing spring, because of the evil apparently so triumphant around her, and because her father resolves to wed her to some unknown and probably villainous person, while she is bent on entering the cloister. That maiden has lived in all centuries and is living yet, though the world

has lately grown incredulous of her. And the fierce and cruel spirit in men that made life terrible to her, breathes with savage eloquence in the two sonnets of Cecco Angiolieri (Nos. 30 and 31):

"S'i fosse foco, arderei 'l mondo;
S'i fosse vento, lo tempesterei ;
S'i fosse acqua, io l' annegherei ;
S'i fosse Dio, mandereil in profondo."

If I were fire, this world I'd make a burning heap;

If I were wind, I'd blow it down;
If I were water, it should drown;
If I were God, I'd hurl it to the
deep.

Mr Lucas places these two sonnets with dramatic effect between the stately amenities of Guido Cavalcante and other lesser singers of his century. And then we come to the 'Vita Nuova' itself.

Eleven of the lovely sonnets and six canzoni are given from it, breathing the wonderful young love of Dante for Beatrice, the most famous passion known to poetry. With their pure flame of adoration and the mystic quality that lifts them always just above the level of earthly love, even when the young heart's beating is felt along the lines, as in the incomparable (No. 49),

"Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore,"

they waken in us a feeling that no other love - poetry wakens, a tender awe like their own before the spiritual mystery of beauty. One canzone ends with lines that seem to foreshadow the place of Beatrice in the 'Divina Commedia ':

"Perchè il piacere della sua beltate

Partendo sè dalla nostra veduta
Divenne spirital bellezza grande,
Che per lo cielo spande

Luce d'amor che gli angeli saluta,
E lo intelletto loro alto e sottile
Face maravigliar; tanto è gentile !"

Wherefore the pleasure of her loveliness
Departing from this region of our sight
Became a spirit-beauty great and high,
That spreads through all the sky
A ray of love greeting the angels bright
Till their deep minds and keen do
marvel much;

The wonder of her gentleness is such !

Beautiful as these early poems of Dante's are, they are only the work of his youth. We cannot from what is included in this Anthology form the remotest conception of his genius at its full strength. The amazing scope of the 'Divina Commedia,' its heights and depths, its bitterness, its exaltation, its dramatic intensity, its prophetic vision,-all these are what we think of

An

when we name Dante, and none of these are here. Anthology of English poems which should include a dozen of Shakespeare's sonnets, his "Venus and Adonis " and "The Rape of Lucrece," would give an idea of Shakespeare about as adequate.

Another great poet and glory of Italian literature is hardly represented at all. Mr Lucas gives us just ten pages of Ariosto's trifling, ending with a sonnet of perfect and simple sincerity. But how, indeed, in a collection of lyrics, is the wonderful story-teller to find justice and a place? Ariosto is a poet of the rank of Chaucer, wide of vision, gay and musioal of tongue, amused, sympa

thetic, and ironical by turns, keeping his story swiftly moving with an art that looks like naïveté, and a superb variety of circumstance. He is not Chaucer's equal in humanity and wit, but more than his equal in melody and force. The sonnet already alluded to we shall quote, not as characteristic of Ariosto, but for exactly the opposite reason. In literature as in life, people sometimes speak out of character, and the result is invariably interesting (No. 155):—

"Come creder debb' io che tu in ciel oda,

Signor benigno, i miei non caldi
preghi,

Se gridando la lingua che mi sleghi,
Tu vedi quanto il cor nel laccio

goda?

Forgive me all, eternal Lord! too well Hath evil custom blinded my clear sight

Till good from ill I scarcely now can tell.

A heart that's penitent can ask with right

A mortal's pardon, but to draw

hearts from hell Against their will Thou only hast the might.

Now to turn back a century or so and to think upon a poet who is at least distinctly if not fully represented in the collection, Francesco Petrarca. His very name brings gracious melody into the mind. There is an art that may reach perfection, and that art was his. It would be impossible to overestimate the influence of Petrarca upon Italian literaHis work was studied, worshipped, and, alas! imitated, more or less consciously, by every man of poetic and ambitious talent, for at least two centuries. No one ever imitated Dante. The reason is hardly worth pointing out. Dante is one of the universal poets, as Shakespeare is. Men read Shakespeare who read no other poet, and who believe that they care nothing for poetry. Men read Dante as if a spell were laid upon them to read him, as indeed it is, the spell of an intellect so concentrated, a heart so ardent, a voice so vibrating with passion, that it

arrests the listener's mind and holds him prisoner. The men who read Petrarca are those whom the gods have made poetical. He is the poets' poet, as Spenser was called, but for a different reason. All that he does is perfect, cleanly out

and

lined, full of melody, finished to the limit of the possible, yet without a trace of effort. The ars celare artem had never a better exponent. He carried his learning lightly, he who was the most learned man in Italy, as well as the immortal lover of Laura.

From the "Canzoniere" Mr Lucas has given us both songs and sonnets, chosen excellently well. It is difficult to make a selection from work so even in quality. The same kind of difficulty would be would be felt in making a selection from the works of Thomas Campion, who, though not nearly so great a man as Petrarca, was yet a lyric poet of exquisite quality, and whose work was similarly even in merit. There is not a more beautiful canzone in Italian than (No. 66)—

"Chiare, fresche e dolci acque,”

or the one which Mr Lucas gives, following this (No. 67)—

"Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte."

But we miss the radiant little poem

"Giovane donna sott' un verde lauro,"