Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/18

xiv the European collections of tales which arose in this manner was the well-known Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, compiled in Italy, in the middle of the fourteenth century.

Another characteristic found in the mediæval collection of stories given in the present volumes appears to have been derived from the East. Among the Oriental peoples there was a tendency, which dates perhaps from as remote an antiquity as the tales themselves, to use them as illustrations of moral or political sentiments. It is thus, in fact, that they are introduced in the collections to which I have just alluded. In Sendabad, when the vizier or sage tells a story, its object is to assist the narrator in setting the king right in some sentiment in which he is supposed to have gone wrong. It is evident that in a certain state of not very high mental culture such a method of reasoning would have great force; and it appears to