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PUBLISHED BY JOHN BISCO, 121 FULTON-STREET.
1841.

P2577.1

Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-one,
BY JOHN BISCO,

In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

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LIKE all or nearly all the other nations of Europe, the Modern Greeks have two kinds, they might be called two grades, of poetry: one in all respects original and spontaneous, popular alike in substance and in form, traditional, and unwritten; the other written, and into which labor and art, imitation and learning, enter more or less largely and more or less happily, according to times, places, and individuals.

The latter, springing up at about the same period with the modern literature of Europe, was at first, like that, the organ of the noblest thoughts and most refined feelings of the middle ages; and if it has not since exhibited as lofty a flight and as complete a development, the two have never at all events been totally separated from each other, nor has it failed to attain for itself a striking degree of beauty and maturity. This portion of the vulgar* Greek poetry is, if not the most interesting, at least the most extensive and varied, and comprehends the most curious and the oldest productions, as well as the most ingenious and finished compositions.

But it is not of this portion that I propose to treat: such an under taking would carry me far beyond the limits within which I am circumscribed. My design is simply to communicate, with considerable minuteness of detail, some idea of the other branch of Modern Greek poetry; a poetry popular in every sense and in all the force of the term; a direct and faithful reflection of the national character and spirit, known and felt by every Greek from the fact that it is Greek; that it dwells on the soil and breathes the air of Greece; a poetry in short, which lives not a factitious and often but apparent life in books, but in the people themselves, and in all the life of the people.

From the diversity of their subjects, the popular songs of the Greeks may all be arranged in three leading classes, domestic, historical, and romantic, or imaginative.

Under the title of domestic I include such as have been composed

*Vulgar is here used as synonymous with modern, in opposition to ancient or classic. VOL. XVIII. 1

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