Gnao bao, bao gnao,
Mi son tanto inamorao!
In most respects Venetian would approach closely to standard Italian were it not for the pronunciation; yet to the uneducated Venetian, Italian sounds very strange. A maid-servant who had picked up a few purely Italian words, was found to be under the delusion that she had been learning English. The Venetian is unable to detect a foreigner by his accent. An English traveller had been talking for some while to a woman of Burano, when she asked in all seriousness, "Are you a Roman?" A deficiency of grammar, a richness in expressive colloquialisms, and the possession of certain terms of Greek origin, constitute the main features of the Venetian dialect as it is known to us. It was used by the Republic in the affairs of state, and it was generally understood throughout Italy, because, as Evelyn records, all the world repaired to Venice "to see the folly and madnesse of the Carnevall." With the exception of Dante, every one seems to have been struck by its merits, of which the chief, to modern ears, are vivacity and an exceeding softness. It can boast of much elegant lettered poetry, as well as of Goldoni's best comedies. To the reading of the latter when a child, Alfieri traced his particular partiality for "the jargon of the lagunes." Byron declared that its naïveté was always pleasant in the mouth of a woman, and George Sand mentions it approvingly as "ce gentil parler Vénitien, fait à ce qu'il me semble pour la bouche des enfants."
SICILIAN FOLK-SONG.
L'Isola del Fuoco—the Isle of Fire, as Dante named it—is singularly rich in poetic associations. Acis, the sweet wood-born stream, Galatea, the calm of the summer sea, and how many more flower-children of a world which had not learned to "look before and after," of a people who deified nature and naturalised deity, and felt at one with both, send us thence across the ages the fragrance of their immortal youth. Our mind's magic lantern shows us Sappho and Alcæus welcomed in Sicily as guests, Pindar writing his Sicilian Odes, the mighty Æschylus, burdened always perhaps with a sorrow—untainted by fretful anger—because of that slight, sprung from the enthusiasm for the younger poet, the heat of politics, we know not what, which drove him forth from Athens: yet withal solaced by the homage paid to his grey hairs, and not ill-content to die
On the bank of Gela productive of corn.
To Sicily we trace the germs of Greek comedy, and the addition of the epode to the strophe and anti-strophe. We remember the story of how, when the greatness of Athens had gone to wreck off Syracuse, a few of the starving slaves in the latomiæ were told they were free men, thanks to their ability to recite passages from Euripides; we remember also that new story, narrated in English verse, of the adventure which befell the Rhodian maid Balaustion, on these Sicilian shores, and of the good stead stood her by the knowledge of Alcestis. We think of Sicily as the birth-place of the Idyllists, the soil which bore through them an aftermath of Grecian song thick with blossom as the last autumn yield of Alpine meads. Then by a strange transformation scene we get a glimpse of Arabian Kasîdes hymning the beauties of the Conca d'Oro, and as these disappear, arise the forms of the poets of whom Petrarch says—
. . . i Sicilian!
Che fur già primi