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cial dress. Conspicuous among these used to stand out the fine brown head of the new Superintendent of Schools, who had received his appointment that very year. Domenico Carbone remains one of the brightest and most pleasant memories of my youth. How much good, even apart from direct instruction, can a scholar receive from a man of superior intelligence and noble character! The arrival of this superintendent, crowned with the double glory of poet and voluntary participant in the war of 1848 and preceded by the reputation of an upright and straightforward man, young in years, handsome in person, at once kindly and severe, and full of nobility in act and speech, had sent as it were a wave of clear, pure air through all the schools. In each class-room where he entered and spoke he left behind him an aroma of good intentions and noble ambitions as well as an impression of thorough good breeding which stirred our very souls. He worked wonders, reformed pupils who had hitherto been untamable and aroused the most lethargic to enthusiasm. All the poor, over-worked pupils, such as are to be found in every school, all the unhappy victims of the bulldozing of their companions or the antipathy of their teachers, even before they had personal experience of his kindness, felt his very presence to be a protection and many an act of injustice or knavery was prevented by the mere utterance of his name. All loved and revered him. We crowded to the landings to see him pass on the stairs. We made special expeditions and took round-about paths through the city just to meet and greet him and when in the Cathedral at the Te Deum, he appeared sitting at the head of the row of teachers and turned upon the pack of scholars his two great eyes, so grave and loval, and said by his kindly smile. "There are my boys!"-our

hearts responded with a leap of love and pride. If instead of multiplying rules and regulations we could only multiply such men as these!

I will tell a little story in which he plays a part, not so much to do him honor as to raise a laugh at my own expense; for this gives me the sort of pleasure now-a-days, which the flagellanti of old used to derive from being flayed. We had had for years as vicesuperintendent a priest not so much inflamed by religious zeal as inflammable by nature, who wore his cassock as though it had been a strait-waistcoat. He was not a bad fellow at bottom but very quick-tempered and possessed by a mania for playing the ogre, a rôle which he enacted chiefly by means of mysterious threats and by rolling his eyes like the Louis XI of the stage. There was circulating through the school a satiric poem of which this man was the object. It had been written by a student in Philosophy whom I happened to know because of the intimacy between our respective families. Wild to read the satire, the reverend father conceived the notion of frightening me into handing it over. And, summoning me to his office at a time when we were sure of finding ourselves alone he adjured me in solemn words to bring him the corpus delicti, under penalty of being "flunked" at my final examinations, and he further prescribed the precise day and hour when the poem was to be consigned to him in that very room. When we parted I was trembling from head to foot, equally distressed by his threat of vengeance and by the thought of the ignoble action which I found myself enjoined to commit, and I passed the entire day in a state of harrowing uncertainty. But next morning a saving thought flashed into my mind, Domenico Carbone! I was quite sure that he would

disapprove the action of the priest and not condemn my own disobedience and still there was no need of my making the matter a serious one by means of a formal appeal to his authority. Knowing that at the hour fixed for my response Carbone was always in his office, with my bug-bear and his own private secretary, I rather thought that if I were to set forth my refusal with an oratorical flourish and in a strident voice, he would be sure to hear and demand an explanation, whereupon I should escape-my enemy be hoist with his own petard. Eureka! Really for a boy of thirteen it wasn't altogether a bad idea. And not only did I feel myself safe from that moment but with the confusion of ideas common to mankind in such cases I began to conceive of myself as a Spartan soul and I composed in my mind an answer which should display my heroism; a theatrically effective repartee which should set forth in shining colors all my true nobility of character.

At the appointed hour I entered the office, setting my heels down hard, as if to make my spurs resound. At a great table were seated on the one side Carbone and his secretary talking to one another, on the other the ogre who, at the moment, almost moved me to compassion. He signed to me to approach and then asked in a whisper if I "had brought it."

I struck an attitude, threw back my head and with a side-long glance at the superintendent replied in a loud voice, "I have not brought it. I have made up my mind that to do so would be to commit an action-"

"All right! All right!" said the priest, motioning to me to be silent.

But I raised my voice and continued, "To do so would be to commit an action unworthy of myself—"

1 Knight, who hast a faith as white,
As is thy white cross (on the shield of
Savoy)

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But I had now got my wind, the superintendent had turned round, and I determined to deal my blow at all hazards, so once more I struck in,-"An action unworthy of myself. The betrayal of a friend-"

"Will you go?" screamed the priest, his face purple with anger. "When I tell you there is nothing more to be said, why don't you leave?"

So I went, but slowly, and with a dragging step, as Pier Capponi must have withdrawn from the presence of Charles the Eighth. I turned on the threshold and gave a last look at my vanquished foe, who returned it with a burning, not to say blasting glance. I never knew whether the superintendent sought and obtained an explanation of the affair, but there was no doubt that the priest had understood my tactics. The fact is that I never heard anything more of the affair and that I got my promotion when examination time came, though as usual I only just pulled through. And that is how, among his other good deeds, the author of Re Tentenna unconsciously prevented my being a cad.

Cavalier che hai bianca fede
Come bianca è la tua croce,
Tu d'eroi gagliardo erede,

.

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of

ture warlike rhymes. Twenty citizens could not gather about a dish of risotto alla Milanese without someone's thundering forth an avalanche strophes which would presently circulate in manuscript or print, inflaming many with hatred against Austria, some with hatred of the Muses. But, with the exception of Carbone, only one of this swarm of poets has remained clear to my recollection. Permit me to present him, so that his memory which is one of the comforts of my own life may add some sweetness also to yours. He was the professor of Philosophy, one of the most delightful oddities who can ever have enlivened the schools of this kingdom; a long-haired man of fifty, his head half hidden by a great nap-less hat of the stove-pipe pattern, which looked as though it were nailed to his skull. He wore all the year round a threadbare black coat which descended to his knees and he was a man sure to have become famous in our city were it only for one habitual gesture. He had the most comical way of doubling up one arm with its fist clenched, then pounding the elbow furiously with his other hand, as though he felt it his duty to give himself a beating. Strange indeed were the lessons we learned of him! Quite seriously he used to demand of his most experienced pupils friendly counsels concerning the bearing he should assume toward a widow to whom he was then paying court, but whom he could not make up his mind to marry because her views about the proper hours for meals did not coincide with his own:the "noisiest of the Philosophers," his colleagues used to call him because he bellowed forth his lectures on PhilosNuova Antologia.

2 "Natura ti die nome
Petitti, ma sei grande
E il nome tuo si spande
Per l'avla elattoral."

ophy with a lung-power which drowned the voices of all the professors in the neighboring class-rooms. But all these peculiarities are as nothing in comparison with the unimaginable originality of his verses, which all his pupils used to recite, laughing the while as if to dislocate their jaws. What a pity that I have no longer a copy of them! But, Heaven be praised! I have not forgotten them all. I remember one stanza of a hymn addressed to General Petitti, to the effect that, though his name was petty his Soul was great, and promising him a glorious triumph at the polls:-also a few lines from another poem in honor of the city of Bene, which extends, if he is to be believed, over seven hills, a fact which afforded the poet a pretext for addressing to it the somewhat strained compliment, that only a misapprehension had led to the choice of Rome in her stead as capital of Italy.'

How anyone could teach Philosophy who treated Poetry after this fashion, even though the two are not twin sisters, remains an insoluble problem. But they used to say that he was a good fellow after all. O mysteries of the human mind! O wretched poet of Bene and its seven hills! I last heard of him many years later in Turin. The story ran that something induced him to have recourse to certain rascals who announced themselves as "mediums" and that these in order to make him hand over his money, had caused him to be thrashed by the spirit whom he had evoked, and this with no magic wand, but with a stout, knotted, ashen stick, which had sent him to bed for a week.

Such are the petty-I might say the Petitti-woes of a philosopher.

(To be continued.)

3 These quite untranslatable lines were as

follows:

Che d'Italia fia regina

Tal cittade che sia posta
Sopra sei e una collina,
E Cavour la credi Roma,
Ignorando i sette in Bene
Colli aprichi, e la gran soma
Di virtu che ascose tiene.

BURNS AS AN ENGLISH POET.

It is easy to foresee one of two things for the enterprise on which I am starting at this moment. I must either establish a fact in literary criticism or I must resign myself to be regarded as an extremely ridiculous person. I accept the risk.

An English critic of influence and distinction some two or three years ago wrote an essay which received a sort of coronation and was rewarded with a prize of fifty pounds. The writer lamented that Burns had occasionally descended into English, and he labored to prove that under those conditions the poet either lost or in some measure degraded his faculty. My purpose in these pages will be to show that Burns was as indisputably a poet in one vehicle as in the other: and I shall even hope to demonstrate that he is at his best and highest in those frequent passages in which he diverges from that Ayrshire Scottish, which was his birthright, to the English tongue. It is not commonly recognized that (apart from his humorous and satirical poems) something like half of Burns's work is done in English pure and simple, nor is it apparently observed that even in some of those poems which are cited as being in the vernacular, the greater bulk of the verse is not even salted with a hint of dialect. One could readily imagine the laughter which might greet the statement that "Scots Wha Hae" is an English poem. Yet the fact remains that there are only five words in a work of twenty-four lines which are not indisputably English. They are "wha," "hae," "wham," "aften" and "fa"," and it is not necessary to point out that these also are English with a localized spelling. In the "Lines to a Mountain Daisy" there are eight Ayrshire words, and the poem contains

nine verses of six lines each. In the "Vision" there are thirty-five consecutive verses of six lines each in which there is not a solitary word of dialect or even of localized spelling. In "Mary in Heaven" we have four eight-line verses of pure English: and no intrusion of a hint of Scots. In "Man was Made to Mourn" there is no dialect. It contains eighty-eight lines. In the "Cottar's Saturday Night" there are one hundred and eighty lines, of which one hundred and thirty contain no Scottish word. It will be admitted by most whose opinion is of value that these are rather curiously chosen examples of the art of sinking. By the general consent of critical mankind "Scots Wha Hae" is the fieriest and intensest call to freedom to which the world has listened. You have but to write "o" for "a," to insert a "v" and a double "1," and, behold! a poem without a trace of local color. And it would appear to be pretended that this volcanic splendor of patriotic rage owes its virtue to a few odd forms of spelling. It is fairly clear that it owes its qualities to the fact that its author was a poet of very unusual faculty, and was, when he chose to be so, a poet in the English tongue. In the case of the cited verses of the "Vision," which are amongst the noblest lines patriot ever wrote, there is no such question offered to us, because they are English without spot or stain. The same fact is true of "Mary in Heaven," of which it may be justly said that it reaches the high-water mark of human emotion. The same fact is true of very much more than half the "Cottar's Saturday Night," which has moved its millions to tears and smiles the world

over.

Merely to establish the fact that Rob

ert Burns could write lovely or inspiring English is a task which presents no difficulty. But the theory I have at heart to prove is not one which will be at once or willingly accepted. It seems to me as if Mr. Henley had stood upon his head to think when he expressed the idea that Burns descended into English. To me it appears that he never in any case, in his really serious work, does anything but soar into it, and that his very value as a poet of dialect is incalculably increased by the fact that he was so great an English master. I shall try to prove that an essential part of his craftsmanship lies in his familiarity with English and his readiness to make use of it, and I shall hope to show a feature of his genius which has hitherto, so far as I know, been disregarded by all his critics. (I may say that I do not propose to deal with the Songs, some forty of which are possibly written in English for no better reason than that they were meant by a musical composer for an English, or partly English, market. I do not think them on the whole nearly so good as the Scots verses of their kind, though in both a perfunctory sort of inspiration seems frequently to have been at work. But to know where we are it is needful to say that we are dealing with a poet who for one reason or another chose to confine himself in some seventy poems to the English language, and who invariably employed that language more or less in his wholly serious dealings with pen and ink.

My argument will apply to Burns in his inspired and splendid hours alone, but it is obvious that it cannot deal with all of them. If the gentleman in the "Critic" cannot see the Spanish Fleet he has a reason for it. It is not yet in sight. In trying to show how much Burns was a master of English and to what effect he used his mastery I must not deal with "Halloween" nor

with "Holy Willie's Prayer," nor "Death and Dr. Hornbook," nor "The Holy Fair," nor the lines on Grose the Antiquary, nor the immortal address to the De'il, because not a line of English is to be found in any one of them. That each and every one of these is a masterpiece in its way I am not merely willing to admit but eager to proclaim, and there is one thing I feel impelled to say of them in passing, even if it should point to the extrusion of the English critic altogether. These outbreaks of wrath, of satire, of pathos, of humor and affectionate familiarity with old uses not yet bygone, are not rightly to be enjoyed by any foreigner whomsoever. The true lover of the truly vernacular verse of Burns is that he or she who was bred within their influence in childhood and in whose mind they awaken emotions which they cannot arouse in the minds of others. There are many passages which I cannot read or recall without a clear vision of my father's face, and a clear hearing of his Scottish voice. These things are of course extrinsic to the value of the verse, but they-and a hundred of their similars-lend a sacred pleasure dare I say?-to the reading of Burns, which is only known to those who have been born within his borders. It is very certain that if Burns had rigorously confined himself to the vernacular he would have had a comparatively poor audience in point of numbers, and even as things stand there are more downright pretenders amongst his professed worshippers than ever followed another poet. All the world over one meets cockney admirers of "Duncan Gray" for example, for whom "spak o' lowpin' o'er a linn" might be Chinese or Choctaw for anything they know to the contrary. It would be absurd to say that an intense pleasure may not be experienced in the reading of great work in any foreign tongue which one has had the industry to

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