dim light of a smoky petroleum lamp, and amid the anything but sweet savors of smoked meat and salted fish. Yet this is real fame. It is the fashion with some people to undervalue the author of the "Decamerone," to blame his style as heavy and his subjects as either frivolous or sentimental. What other prose story. teller can delight an unlettered audience of his countrymen after so many centu ries? To have one's works published in sixpenny editions a hundred years after one's death is said to be the surest of all guarantees of immortality; and while we still find "Tristram Shandy" and "Tom Jones" on the railway bookstalls we shall refuse to believe the superfine critics who assert that Fielding is too coarse to be read with pleasure in the nineteenth century, and that Sterne's humor is out of date. On a holiday the wine-room brightens, particularly if there are marriageable daughters or nieces, and the evening frequently concludes with a game of lotto, for an Italian is by nature a gambler. In such places, however, the risk is not great. A single card costs two centesimi, so that five may be bought for a penny. No one, however, is likely to indulge in such extravagance as that, unless it be some aspirant to the daughter's hand who is ignorant or careless of the old proverb which says that those who win in love are sure to lose at play; two cards, or at most four, are the rule. The person who collects the money and draws the numbers - it is never the host or hostess does not play himself. The happy owner of the card which is first filled up receives a lira, and if anything more remains in the pool, the play is continued and the second || winner receives it. It is pleasant to watch such a game in which children of seven and old men of seventy seem to take an equal interest, and to see the solemn eagerness with which withered and chubby hands alike place their white beans on the numbers that are drawn. Twelfth Night is the great winter festival of the Florentines, though it is now celebrated almost exclusively in domestic circles. After the children have fallen asleep, the mother takes their stockings away and fills clean ones with fruit, sweetmeats, and little presents, among which two or three pieces of charcoal carefully wrapped up in paper are usually to be found. These treasures are carefully hidden in different parts of the room, and as soon as the children wake the search for the stockings begins. With some slight variations, a similar custom prevails, we believe, in Norway, though it is not observed on the same day. In the olden times the festival was cel ebrated with far greater splendor and had a more public character. A female image of "Santa Epifania" was borne through the town, boys walked in the procession with long glass trumpets, while other boys and girls followed singing hymns. It was probably such processions that suggested to Luca della Robbia several of the wonderful reliefs which are now the glory of the Bargello. The color is fading out of Italian life, as it always does before the advance of our modern civilization, and the only reminiscence of the old custom that remains is the habit of giving boys trumpets on the eve of Epiphany. They used always to be of glass; but some enterprising manufacturer has discovered that they are more durable and may be made more cheaply when metal is employed, so now the old glass trumpets are only to be found in the houses of the rich and noble. We are certainly progressing, but in what direction? That is a ques tion to which political economy and art are apt to give different answers. In Havana Epiphany is still celebrated with festivities of a similar character, only there a negress, bedizened to the height of her fantasy, takes the place of the sacred image, and demands gifts from the white inhabitants, which she is supposed to divide equally among her noisy followers. Does not this look something like a travesty of the old Florentine festival with its boy trumpeters and choirs of youths and maidens? Few of the educated inhabitants of Havana would be sorry if the negress saint and her court were suppressed; and perhaps we are apt to view the old customs of Italy through spectacles too deeply colored by the imagination of her great artists. The procession of Epiphany, at any rate, had been degraded before it was abolished. Even in Horace Walpole's time, it seems already to have lost whatever grace or dignity it may once have possessed. On January 27, 1743, he wrote to Sir Horace Mann: "I am a little pleased, too, that Marquis Bagnesi, whom you know I always liked much, has behaved so well, and am more pleased to hear what a Beffana the Electress is." To which Lord Dover added the cruel note: "A beffana was a puppet, which was carried about the town on the evening of the Epiphany. The word is de rived from epifania. It also means an ugly woman. The electress (Palatine dowager, last of the house of Medici) happened to go out for the first time after an illness on the Epiphany, and said in joke to Prince Craon, that the beffane all went abroad on that day."" education more of an international affair, in the hope that it would help to render men of business more cosmopolitan. The more Englishmen came to settle abroad and the more foreigners came to settle in England, the more human and friendly the intercourse between ourselves and other nations would become. A man who lives in one country while he remains a citizen of another, has every reason to desire that the government to which he owes the obedience of a citizen shall remain on good terms with the government to which he owes the allegiance of a sub Thus we descend from high processions to a crowd of riotous negroes, and from the awful yet lovely image of a saint to an ugly old woman, but still the winter sun shines brightly on the hills and palaces of Florence, and still the old statues, reliefs, and frescoes bear witness to a life that once was, or that at least their mak-ject. He does not wish to have to make ers thought might be. his choice between them. His object is that the dividing line between the obliga tions he owes to each should become more and more obscure, until, in practice, he is equally at home in the country in which From The Spectator. he lives and in the country to which he THE NEW GERMAN AND SLAV QUARREL. belongs. The news that comes to us NOTHING is more curious in contempo- from the eastern provinces of Prussia rary politics than the disuse of the formu- and the Baltic provinces of Russia is in las which a generation ago were supposed strange contrast with these once popular to express the permanent convictions of ideas. Both governments are busy in men imbued with the modern spirit. The driving out each other's subjects, not as a most striking instance, of course, is the measure of punishment, but because the change of the ideas about war. Five-and-permanent occupation of their territory by thirty years ago it was regarded by san- foreigners is distasteful to them. Their guine people as an extinct evil, and even ambition is to deserve that highest comby those who prided themselves on their pliment that the English poor can pay practical good sense as a survival which, to a neighbor, by keeping "themselves though it might die hard, was not the less to themselves." In Prussia especially, bound to die. To-day, everywhere but in though merely because she had the adEngland war is accepted as the one contin- vantage of beginning earlier, the banishgency against which every State has to ment has been attended with very great make unceasing provision; while even in cruelty. It may sound but a trifling matEngland, though we do not do much in the ter to make a man return to his own coun. way of making provision for it, we are try; but if all his means of subsistence constantly engaged in it. The Continen- are in the country of his adoption, it is to tal powers have certainly been able to him just as bad as exile. The Pole who clear their minds of cant." Whether Eu- has long been settled in Prussia has his rope is any better off for the frankness land or his trade, and the latter is proba with which the powers have carried out bly quite as immovable as the former. the process, is another question. There His business connections, his private are some delusions which, if people could friendships, his opportunities of doing only make-believe hard enough and long well by his children, are all in Prussia; enough, might in time cease to be delu- and to drive him back to Poland is to sions; and the notion that civilized man is deprive him of all these. He will, at the capable of living at peace with his neigh-best, have to begin life over again, and he bor is one of these. Prussia and Russia at this moment are examples of another reaction towards primitive ideas. It used to be held that the extension of trade, and the gradual intermingling of populations that comes of it, were guarantees for the maintenance of good relations between the States concerned. There was even a scheme on foot, if we remember rightly, for making will be fortunate if he has the energy or the capital to do this. It is difficult to imagine a decree which carries greater misery with it than one which uproots a full-grown man from the associations of half a lifetime, perhaps of two generations, and sends him to a land in which there is probably no room for him, and which he, or probably his father, has voluntarily abandoned. Yet the end they hope to gain seems together distasteful to them. In part, too, Prince Bismarck and to the Russian gov. the question is one of creed. The decay ernment worth the infliction of all this of religious distinctions in England has misery. They both wish not only to be no counterpart in these more primitive masters in their own dominions, but to lands. There, religious unity is still have none but their own countrymen to be looked upon as the natural accompaniment masters over. They do not want to see and most effectual safeguard of political the line of demarcation between natives unity. The Prussian government is glad and foreigners effaced; on the contrary, to be rid of the Poles because they are it is to be drawn sharper than ever. It is Catholics. The Russian government not easy to assign any common motive for wishes obedience to the decrees of the this policy, because it seems to be justified Holy Synod to be co-extensive with obediin the two cases by quite opposite reasons.ence to the czar. The Poles are hated by the Prussians because they belong to a lower type of civilization; the Germans are hated by the Russians because they belong to a higher type of civilization. The Pole supplies cheap labor, the German supplies organization and sufficient superintendence; and both seem to be held in equal detestation by the country which might be supposed to profit by the importation. In both cases, the population among which the strangers have settled, think themselves the sufferers by their rivalry. The German workman holds a Pole in much the same estimation as that in which the Californian or the Australian workman holds a Chinaman. He hates to be undersold by an inferior race which has no right to throw itself across his path. The Russian employer hates the German employer because he is a better man of business than he is himself, can get more out of his workmen, and turn over his capital more quickly. From the commercial point of view, all this is only another form of protection. It is of no use, the advocates of expulsion argue, to keep out foreign goods if foreign men are permitted to come over the frontier and make native goods. This would be a quite sufficient reason in the eyes of the two governments for takably insist on treating it as a measure that ing the question in hand, for trade is more and more the chief object of international rivalry. But there are probably other reasons which weigh with them quite as much. They like the sharply defined frontier line. The notion of an intervening district in which the contrasts between the two nations are softened down until they almost escape recognition, is alto Prince Bismarck's part in these transactions has been marked by another unexpected, but characteristic feature. The creator of the German Empire has been the first to forbid an extension of imperial supervision over the separate States, if it promises to run counter to his plans. More than once since the expulsion of the Poles, their friends have tried to bring their case before the German Parliament, but each time Prince Bismarck has refused to be drawn into any discussion of it. It is a matter, he maintains, which does not concern the imperial authorities. How Prussia shall deal with its own de facto subjects, is for Prussia alone to decide. He will answer for what he has done in the Prussian Parliament, where he speaks as a minister of the Prussian king; but he will not defend his acts in the German Parliament, where he only speaks as the chancellor of the German emperor. When it suits his purpose, Prince Bismarck can be as great a partic ularist as Herr Windthorst himself. The legislature he esteems is the legislature that gives him what he wants. If the Prussian Parliament were opposed to the expulsion of the Poles, and the German Parliament in favor of it, he would prob could only be challenged in the latter. Because he knows that the German Parliament would give, indeed has already given, a majority against his anti-Polish policy, he is determined to deny it any competence in the matter, and poses as the representative of a king who, as regards one of the highest of all international questions, is independent of the empire. 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The snowdrop comes when Christmas joys May some white blessing, God-sent, crown Thy childhood's hopes and fears! Then take the snowdrop for thy flower, God gift it with a magic power, With meanings wide and deep! Life may have roses red in store, But in thine heart forevermore, Thine own white snowdrop keep! All The Year Round. O FINEST essence of delicious rest! To bid for some short space the busy mill Of anxious, ever-grinding thought be still; And let the weary brain and throbbing breast Be by another's cooling hand caressed. This volume in my hand, I hold a charm Which lifts me out of reach of wrong or harm. I sail away from trouble; and, most blessed Of every blessing, can myself forget: Can rise above the instance low and poor Into the mighty law that governs yet. This hinged cover, like a well-hung door, Shuts out the noises of the jangling day, These fair leaves fan unwelcome thoughts away. F. M. P. LIVING AGE, No. 2171. |