Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/491

Rh avait bien dans son mémoire autant de récits qu'en contiennent Les Mille et une Nuits; elle aurait lutté contre Schéhérazade."

In the year 1550, appeared in Venice, the first part, and in 1554, the second, of a collection of stories, jests, and riddles linked together in a fashion similar to that used by Boccaccio, and bearing the title, Thirteen Delightful Nights (Tredici piacevoli notti). This has since been frequently reprinted. It contains in all 74 pieces (among which there are twenty-one stories) divided into thirteen Nights. The author, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, of Caravaggio, in the Milanese, must have lived from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 16th century, for an edition of his poems appeared in Venice, even as early as in the year 1508. It is impossible to speak with more precision, as neither the year of his birth nor of his death is known, nor has any other event of his life been noted. He gathered together the materials for his Nights from various places, information about which may be found in Dunlop, (Liebrecht's translation, 283, 284, 494-497), but it was not so with the stories, which were gathered from oral traditiontradition. [sic] One of them (12. 3) is however taken from Morlini, and left unaltered; another (5. 7) betrays some affinity to it. In the frequently coarse stories composed in Latin, which have just been republished (Novellæ, fabulæ, comædia, Paris, 1855), there is nothing else that is story-like. Compare Liebrecht's translation of Dunlop, 494-498. Straparola's writing is very unequal both in style and power of delineation, nor is it unusually good even in his best pieces, but many things are told agreeably, naturally, and not ungracefully, while, on the contrary, others are told not only indecently, but with such shameless obscenity, that we are unable to excuse it on the score of the natural and free manners of the Italians, and of the period. On this account the book was included in the list of forbidden works in Rome, 1605, and an abridged and expurgated edition was prepared elsewhere. The stories, however, are tolerably free from this taint, and they constitute the greater part of the entire work. Straparola, as we read in the preface to the second edition (before the 6th Night), "wrote them down from the lips of ten young girls," and he expressly declares that the stories are not his property. The best literary information is furnished by a German translation (Die Nächte des Straparola von Caravaggio,