dance languishes, the songs are forgotten. It is true that some,

and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if

there were spirit to support or to revive them. At the last feast

of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the

inanimate performance of the dancers. When the people sang for us

in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.

They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the

old that knew the songs. The whole body of Marquesan poetry and

music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited

generation. The full import is apparent only to one acquainted

with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh

song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for

instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve

keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song

following another without pause. In like manner, the Marquesan,

never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production.

The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with

the death-rate of the islanders. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows,

and man departs,' says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands. And

surely this is nature. Fond as it may appear, we labour and

refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid

eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one

is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt

whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It

is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse

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