worth's, conveying an idea of the utmost sublimity. As he As he describes the wind rising in the trees, his voice seems to swell and sink like the wind; and the last two lines are perfect in their haunting melody.

All his descriptions of nature have the same restraint and power. There is no wordpainting; the impression is rather on the mind than on the eyes, and therefore indelible. It is not the shadow and shine of moonlight that he dwells on, but the pensive remoteness of the pilgrim moon sailing on high across the desert:

"Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina,
Che si pensosa sei, tu forse intendi
Questo viver terreno,

Il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia ;
Che sia questo morir, questo supremo
Scolorar del sembiante,

E perir dalla terra, e venir meno
Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia.”

But thou, eternal pilgrim of the sky, Lonely and pensive, haply thou dost know

This earthly life,

Our suffering and our sighing what it is;

What is this dying, this supreme
Fading of form and colour,
Perishing from the earth, and vanishing
From all familiar loving company.

By the lake-side no alluring colours or soft reflections does he notice, but the deep and motionless quiet of a lonely place where still water is; a quiet that can communicate itself to the mind till sense and motion are forgotten, and the limbs slacken and lie as if in death:

"Talor m' assido in solitaria parte, Sovra un rialto, al margine d' un lago Di taciturne piante incoronato.

del Villaggio" (No. 315), are poems in which there is less bitterness, though the music is always mournful. "Le Ricordanze" (No. 314) begins with a lovely recollection of night in his father's garden at Recanati, the golden stars overhead, the whispering, flower-scented breeze, tall cypresses in the wood, and fire-flies flickering among shadows. Suddenly the thought of what this longfamiliar beauty had meant to him in boyhood seizes his heart with the sharp pang of disillusion and wild regret for that lost youth:

"O speranze, speranze; ameni inganni Della mia prima età! sempre, parlando, Ritorno a voi; chè per andar di tempo, Per variar d'affetti e di pensieri, Obbliarvi non so. Fantasmi, intendo, Son la gloria e l'onor; diletti e beni Mero desio; non ha la vita un frutto, Inutile miseria.'

"

a poet at all, as a classical scholar and a philologist he surpassed all his contemporaries, and when he was but twenty-two his learning amazed the learned Niebuhr. It is well that Mr Lucas has given us an ample and representative selection from his poems; for with their perfection of form, their finish and purity of diction, they should be a peculiarly valuable study to English-speaking people.

It is impossible to compare Leopardi with any of his successors: they are happier and smaller men. But one other poet must be mentioned, whom Italy has but recently lost, Giosuè Carducci. He is no mediocrity, but a poet of full stature: serious, original, deeply enthusiastic and learned in his country's literature, with a fine sensibility to beauty, and a manner and message of his

own.

No. 342 is his tribute to

the memory of Shelley. "La Chiesa di Polenta" (No. 344) is a singularly touching poem, revealing a romance of history and the perennial spell of Dante over the spirits of his countrymen.

Here we close our notice of a most interesting book. An unpretending review requires no peroration or ornamental last paragraph. It closes more fitly with thanks; and we offer our sincere thanks to Mr St John Lucas for his 'Oxford Book of Italian Verse.' It cannot fail to be welcomed by all lovers of literature on both sides of the Atlantic.

WHEN a South American, having made a promise, adds the formula "palabra inglesa," he says, in the outward and dictionary sense, "This is an English promise." In the inward and spiritual sense, he means "honour bright." He has given the word of an Englishman, which is to be trusted because it will be fulfilled in action. Now this belief of the South American that our trading ways are honourable is a great asset for our countrymen who do business in the continent, and is valued as such by the better sort of them, who also are the large majority.

Let us begin by giving a proof proper to our present undertaking, that this reliance on our regard for truth is not misplaced. A wise candour is not incompatible with patriotism. All the representatives of our race who are to be found between the Isthmus of Darien and the Straits of Magellan are not men of their word. We cannot jump off our shadow. The ugly caricature of adventurous British enterprise which is British vagabondage is so far from unknown in South America, that it is pretty general.

The

traveller may be, and indeed often is, stopped on the quays of Rio, or in the streets of São Paulo, by a creature with a watery eye, a bulbous nose, and a shaky hand, who has spotted him as coming from

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the old country. He is just the undiluted British vagabond as he is to be met on the great North Road, or loafing outside a public. Of course he is fluent, patriotic, and thanks Heaven that he has at last met a gentleman. It is in the nature of things that he has a tale to pitch-a tale of a cock and a bull, of undeserved misfortunes, of a bag of tools pawned under the pressure of necessity; of a good job offered, but only to be obtained if that bag is released, and of the peremptory need for five milreis. You know that the milreis will be spent on cachacha," commonly pronounced "cashash," which is a sweet and heady cane spirit, very cheap when new. If you are wise you firmly refuse the money. Commonly you give something, and probably you try to help that plausible, wordy, shifty tramp to get work to keep him steady-or at any rate, to go away, and so remove_a disgrace to his country. In the higher lines the superior swindler turns up from time to time with a scheme to induce somebody to cash & cheque. The "new premises " of the Beachcomber's Club at Barracas, on the sea front of Buenos Ayres, are nothing we can be proud of. Two "horses," such as house - painters use, support a damaged sheet of corrugated-iron roofing. Under its shadow the beachcombers sleep and idle, and eat,

smoke, and drink whatever they can get by cadging on the crews of British ships. They have their "Mumpers' King called a chairman, and he makes rules which are said to be well obeyed. He decides, for instance, that whoever on any British ship gives them food is under a moral obligation to give them money to buy drink also. Every incoming ship is visited by a deputation of two from the Beachcomber's Club, and it rarely happens that they come back empty-handed. The openhanded sailor and the charitable resident are the providence of these men, who are not always mere common sailors and stokers, Some of them hold mates' and engineers' certificates. One of these top-sawyer beachcombers recently caused great hilarity in Barracas. Heboarded a steam-trawler which serves the Buenos Ayres market-an Aberdeen built and manned boat, and naturally he came at the dinner-hour. The trawler was at the wharf and the crew were busy. Dinner had been prepared by the cook. The beachcomber who came for broken meats grew impatient when kept waiting, and lifted the whole savoury mess. He got safe away with his booty. Everybody laughed except the Aberdeen men, and even they saw the joke in time. Where do these irreclaimable vagabonds come from? From the same sources as their like at home-the failures of all classes. Seamen and stokers who have deserted, mates and engineers who have gone down by idle

ness, by drink, and by violence, workmen debauched by "cashash," with here and there a man trained in a great English public school who was once a gentleman,-they and others make up the army of beachcombers.

Yet perhaps in part because they are unlike the southern Italian who swells the prison population of South America, and do not murder, these "wasters" do strangely little harm to our national reputation. The chief reason why they do not is, however, that there is ever against them and above them the great English business community which is "muy honrada," very honourable. We would avoid all appearance of pretending that the Englishman is the only honest man in South America. France does not send her best abroad, but French probity in money matters is known and trusted. The Germans, who are largely replacing us in the retail trade because they are more complacent to native ways, are the less respected for the very flattery which pleases; but they are good men of business, which implies that they do not cheat. The Italian in trade is suspected of giving short weight, and of being too ready to take money for services which no honourable man renders. Yet the northern Italian is an admirable "colono" or tiller of the soil. The coffee plantations of São Paulo and the agriculture of the Argentine flourish on his labour. The southern Italian is feared, and employed chiefly when no

body else can be found; but the South American saying, that God made the Neapolitans and the Neapolitans made the railways, has truth. The Spaniard is a close-fisted shopkeeper, and on the land he is less industrious, less manageable, than the Italian; but he is commonly an honest man, and Englishmen who may prefor the good Italians as workmen will say that they like the Spaniard better as a man. He is not so servile nor so given to underhand revenge as the Italian. When his "dignity of man," of which he thinks much and not always wisely, is offended, he breaks out like a man. The Basque stands apart. By common consent he is in the highest rank of those who come to South America. He has, in fact, done a fine thing. He says that he is, by the grace of God, a gentleman, and therefore cannot fall from grace because he does humble work. What defiles, according to his admirable code, is the dishonest doing of the work. Therefore he can be trusted, and prospers greatly. His women are like himself-industrious, well-bred according to their place, and clean in all conceivable manifestations of cleanliness. When the native is not a Government official and in individual cases, even when he is-he, too, can be an honest man. The pure negro, when in his natural position as the welltreated servant of a white man, is an excellent fellow. The Brazilian of PortugueseIndian blood, the "caboclo," and

that born horseman and herdsman, the Argentine "Criojo," require only to be wisely ruled and fairly treated to be good men. Of the mulatto - the mixed Spaniard or Portuguese and negro-it is not easy to speak favourably. He is the standing proof of the accuracy of the Arab proverb, which will have it that Allah made the white man and the black, but that Satan made the halfbreed.

The case is not that Englishmen monopolise the honesty of South America, but that, for reasons not easy to disentangle, he tends to thoroughness of work and to a certain completeness of effort. The manifestation is so much more visible than the cause that one can hardly do better than take an example. Suppose that you are travelling on the Mogyana railway, which runs far north from São Paulo. You will notice the houses you see on the sides of the line. They are of sun-dried brick, and are frequently mere shanties in the country. In the towns they are one - storied, dusty, ill looked after, with, from time to time, a flashy place soaring up to a showy height. But at one station you see a house with a verandah, manifestly well swept and garnished, and round it a garden, well planted and exactly kept, which stands out from surroundings of red dust and litter, as an enamelled plate might shine on a bin of refuse. It is the house of the English engineer. He may not be a more skilled man than the