Note 24 — Basque Poetry.

There are, too, verses of grim and bitter humour, which tell better than the pen of the historian how wretched was formerly the lot of the peasant, even in this favoured corner of France. Famine is personified, and has a name given it, drawn in biting irony from that of the highest Saint of the Church Calendar, Petiri Sanz (S. Peter). He wanders round the country seeking where to settle permanently; at one place he is driven off by (the sale of) rosin, at another little maize, at another by cheese and cherries; but at last he fixes his abode definitively at St. Pée (another form of Peter), on the Nivelle, where they have nothing at all to sell, and where he torments the inhabitants by forcing them to keep many a fast beyond those of ecclesiastical obligation. The same strain of gloomy humour appears in another form in a poem entitled “Mes Méditations,”24 in which a young priest of Ciboure, slowly dying of consumption, traces in detail all the physical and mental agonies of his approaching dissolution. A much less grim example, however, is contained in the following, which we quote mainly because of its brevity. It may remind some of our readers of a longer but similar strain which used often to be sung at harvest-homes in the Midland Counties:—