9-7 



THE CAUSES WHICH PROPAGATE 



locust, but lie seems to have convinced himself they were synony- 

 mous, translating rhv i^vov the guest in both cases " migi-ate 

 hither; " and the summer one, rhv depiv6v, he renders " attendant on 

 the spring/^ Rather should it be : " He the guest, she the guest ; 

 he the summer one, she the summer one ? ■''' The Cicadse, exert- 

 ing their capacity of song in thick boughs, were considered 

 enamoured of the summer. July in Italy ! The leaves and hedge- 

 rows crusted over with thick dust ; the diligence horses sweltering 

 under loads of worn-out travellers, wooing with sunshade and 

 fan the slightest breath of air, and as they rumble along turning 

 up flocks of the no longer scarce Swallow-tail Butterflies from off 

 the village gutter ; the poplars prematurely brown, and melancholy 

 songs of the peasantry echoing among the hills. Who has 

 described an Italian summer better than Horace? We almost 

 seem to rumble past the Coliseum and out on the tomb-lined 

 Appian Way ; in the chariot with his careworn senators, flying 

 the smoke, work, and war-cloud ever brooding over Imperial 

 Rome ; bound for the sparkling villas built into the resounding 

 sea at Baja, there to forget the daily alarms of street fires and 

 toj^pling houses, to bathe in quiet, listen to the seamews, and 

 eat serpent-like mursena and tasty cuttle-fish. And such will 

 ever be unsophisticated Italy. What of Epicurean sentiment is 

 there not in yon strolling banjo-player, reciting in the mediaeval 

 strains of Tasso "Mia arnica^' and the " Campo santo ''^ ? and 

 what of Catullus in the Pifferari ? nay, the very tone of triumphal 

 marches can be caught in yon petite bouquetiere, as she lands 

 from a barquetta, singing as she goes " Margherikima e un 

 Tramvai." And then the drowsy street-calls, " Acqua ! dolch ! 

 fresch \" 



In warm weather the great enemy of mankind is sleepless- 

 ness ; neither is the sultry glare which beats the livelong day 

 on the facade of an Italian house — causing the employment of 

 painted windows in the north and flat-roofed Oriental construc- 

 tion in the south, those ingentes moles of antiquity — at all 

 friendly to sweet forgetfulness and a state of physiological rest. 

 Many times have I risen at midnight and thrown open my 

 window looking out over the shallow torrent of the Po, and there 

 found delight in listening to the melody of the water, blending 

 with the hollow shrill of the Leaf Crickets [Conoce^halus) from 



