[1008]. Schmid, 2d ed., p. 366.
[1009]. Romanisches und Keltisches, pp. 363 f. The four-line stanza, he says, is easy to compose, and one pennill suggests another; so that each is half tradition, half improvisation, belonging “to everybody and nobody.” This description approaches very closely the hypothetical description given by Ten Brink in his sketch of Old English poetry for Paul’s Grundriss, of the making of ballads in a more primitive day.
[1010]. Mr. Gregory Smith’s facile explanation, The Transition Period, pp. 182 f.
[1011]. Ep. II. i. 145 f. See Zell, Ferienschriften, II. 122 ff. Soldiers sang in pairs, or in two sections, these alternate mocking verses.
[1012]. Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht, 1895, pp. 88 ff. The prose translation has less artificial suggestion than the translation in verses.
[1013]. Athenæus and Diodorus are quoted as authorities for the Sicilian origin of such combats in verse; but Jeanroy disposes of this theory by an effective use of the argument from comparative literature. See his Origines, pp. 260 ff.
[1014]. On the meaning and relations of strambotto, stornello, rispetto, ritornello, and the other terms, see Count Nigra’s Canti Popolari del Piemonte, Torino, 1888, pp. xi ff. He corrects Schuchardt’s use of ritornell for stornello. This latter is really an amœbean form of verse, has but one stanza, and this of three lines; the strambotto is one stanza, too, but has four, six, ten, or even more lines. Still, the four-line stanza, as comparison shows, is clearly the primitive form. Southern Italy is, of course, far richer in these songs than Piedmont, the home of lyrical narrative or ballad.
[1015]. Found, too, in India; but here not in the really communal stage. See Gustav Meyer, Essays und Studien, pp. 293 f.
[1016]. Bayerisches Wörterbuch, III. 499, explaining them as Schnitterhüpflein, songs of the reapers.
[1017]. With references to the literature of these songs, work quoted, pp. 332 ff.