Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/172

 clxvi These Norse Tales we may characterise as bold, out-spoken, and humorous, in the true sense of humour. In the midst of every difficulty and danger arises that old world of fable. He, and Warton, and Dunlop, and Price, too, did the dayswork of giants, in tracing out and classifying those tales and fables which had passed into the literature of the Aryan race. But, besides this old region, there is another new hemisphere of fiction which lies in the mouths and in the minds of the people. This new world of fable the Grimms discovered, and to them belongs the glory of having brought all its fruits and flowers to the light of day. This is why their names must ever be foremost in a work on Popular Tales, shining, as their names must ever shine, a bright double star over that new hemisphere. In more modern times, the earliest collection of popular tales is to be found in the Piacevoli Notte of John Francis Straparola of Caravaggio, near Milan, the first edition of which appeared at Venice in 1550. The book, which is shamefully indecent, even for that age, and which at last, in 1606, was placed in the Index Expurgatorius, contains stories from all sources, and amongst them nineteen genuine popular tales, which are not disfigured by the filth with which the rest of the volume is full. Straparola's work has been twice translated into German,—once at Vienna, 1791, and again by Schmidt in a more complete form, Märchen-Saal, Berlin, 1817. But a much more interesting Italian collection appeared at Naples in the next century. This was the Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, who wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, and whose book appeared in 1637. This collection contains forty-eight tales, and is in tone, and keeping, and diction, one of the best that has ever appeared in any language. It has been repeatedly reprinted at Naples. It has been translated into German, and a portion of it, a year or two back, by